Language processing appears to be accompanied by reenactments of “real” perceptual experiences. For example, Kaschak et al. (2005) found lower response latencies to sentence incongruent (compared to congruent) perceptual motion stimuli. In this follow-up study we investigated whether incongruent perceptual information leads to impairment in the processing of movements described in stories. Fifty-three participants (M = 28.15 years, SD = 12.26) were presented with clips while listening to auditory stories. Both the clips and the stories represented equal amounts of towards, away, or nonspecific motion (24 each) and were validated in a separate study. Matches/mismatches between story and clip direction were randomly generated. Conditions were counterbalanced and varied within-subjects. Response accuracy and response latency to a story-related item that was to be answered with “Yes” or “No” were measured. When examining the interaction of story-clip direction, contrary to our hypotheses, there was no significant impairment for incongruent story-clip information, neither for response latency as a dependent variable nor for response accuracy. Exploratively, we also considered “triple-matches” (defined by congruent directions in story, clip, and item; this combination is automatically associated with “Yes”-responses) with those mismatch-combinations that also require “Yes”-responses. Again, no significant difference between “triple-matches” and “mismatches” was detectable. Thus, the assumption of an interaction between direction-related perceptual and textual stimuli was not supported.

Reference: Kaschak, M. P., Madden, C. J., Therriault, D. J., Yaxley, R. H., Aveyard, M., Blanchard, A. A., & Zwaan, R. A. (2005). Perception of motion affects language processing. Cognition, 94(3), 79-89.