The Color Representation In Chinese Sentence Comprehension

Recently, a growing body of research in psychology, psycho-linguistics and cognitive neuroscience has posed a challenge to the traditional view of language comprehension by proposing that cognitive states are not disembodied in language comprehension. Perceptual Symbol System holds that people activate and manipulate perceptual symbols during language comprehension even when the perceptual characteristics are merely implied rather than explicitly stated. Numerous empirical studies have emerged in support of the Perceptual Symbol System. However, color, as a key aspect of perceptual information that has not gained the same attention in the embodiment debate as other visual object attributes, such as shape, orientation and motion. In addition, most researches in this field are limited to English and the Indo-European language, whereas Mandarin Chinese, with both phonetic and ideographic characteristics, is potentially distinct from processing mechanism of that in English. This paper aims to investigate whether implicit perceptual information on object’s color is represented during sentence comprehension in Mandarin Chinese. The main methodology used is the compatibility effect. After reading a sentence that implied a particular color for a given object, participants were presented with an image of the object that either matched or mismatched the implied color. They judged whether the object had been mentioned in the proceeding sentence. The findings are that there is a significant difference on response latency between in matched condition and mismatched condition, which is consistent with the embodied rather than the amodal view of language comprehension. Responses were faster when the object’s color matched the color implied by the sentence than when there was a mismatch. This robust compatibility effects can be explained by participants constructing an embodied representation during sentence comprehension. These findings further verify the Perceptual Symbol System that people routinely activate perceptual information during language comprehension in embodied cognition from the perspective of color representation during language comprehension in Mandarin Chinese.