When participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences that describe action toward the body (i.e., "Mark dealt the cards to you") or away from the body (i.e., "You dealt the cards to Mark"), they are faster to respond when the response requires an arm movement in the same direction as the action described by the sentence. This congruence effect is known as the Action-Sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE). This study reports 4 experiments that extend our understanding of the ACE by exploring how the time at which one prepares the motor response required for the sensibility judgment affects the magnitude of the ACE. Results show that the ACE arises only when participants have the opportunity to plan their motor response while they are processing the sentence.

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Several recent papers have reported long-term structural priming effects in experiments where previous patterns of experience with the double object and prepositional object constructions are shown to affect later patterns of language production for those constructions. The experiments reported in this paper address the extent to which these long-term priming effects are modulated by the participants' patterns of experience with particular verbs within the double object and prepositional object constructions. The results of three experiments show that patterns of experience with particular verbs using the double object or prepositional object constructions do not have much effect on the shape of the longterm structural priming effects reported elsewhere in the literature. These findings lend support to the claim that structural priming is the result of adaptations to the language production system that occur on an abstract, structural level of representation that is separate from representations regarding the behavior of particular lexical items in particular constructions [e.g., Chang, F., Dell, G. S., & Bock, K. (2006). Becoming syntactic. Psychological Review, 113,. 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. KeywordsLanguage production; Structural priming; Lexical effects Structural priming refers to the tendency for speakers (or writers) to repeat syntactic structures across utterances (Bock, 1986). As one particularly well-studied example of this phenomenon, language producers who have recently produced (or comprehended) a double object construction ("Meghan gave her mom a kiss") are more likely to produce another double object construction to describe a transfer event ("Mike sent his boss a postcard") than to produce a prepositional object construction to describe the same event ("Mike sent a postcard to his boss"; see Bock, 1986;Bock & Griffin, 2000;Pickering & Branigan, 1998). Structural priming has been observed with a range of syntactic constructions (e.g., Corley & Scheepers, 2002;Griffin & Weinstein-Tull, 2003;Hartsuiker & Kolk, 1998;Hartsuiker & Westenberg, 2000), and has been observed both in lab tasks (e.g., Bock, 1986;Pickering & Branigan, 1998) and in samples of naturally occurring speech (e.g., Gries, 2005;Weiner & Labov, 1983). Although the repetition of lexical items (e.g., verbs) across utterances has been shown to affect the strength of the priming effects that are observed (e.g., Cleland & Corresponding author. Fax: +1 850 644 7739. kaschak@psy.fsu.edu (M.P. Kaschak). HHS Public Access Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptAuthor ManuscriptAuthor Manuscript Pickering, 2003;Pickering & Branigan, 1998), the hallmark of structural priming effects is that they arise in the absence of such lexical repetition (Bock, 1986(Bock, , 1989.Structural priming is of interest to psycholinguists (and other cognitive scientists) for several reasons. First, the presence (or absence) of structural priming between different kinds of sentences provides insight into the nature of the representations that und...

A number of recent studies have demonstrated variants of the action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE), wherein the execution of a motor response is facilitated by the comprehension of sentences that describe actions taking place in the same direction as the motor response (e.g., a sentence about action towards one's body facilitates the execution of an arm movement towards the body). This paper presents an experiment that explores how the timing of the motor response during the processing of sentences affects the magnitude of the ACE that is observed. The results show that the ACE occurs when the motor response is executed at an early point in the comprehension of the sentence, disappears for a time, and then reappears when the motor response is executed right before the end of the sentence. These data help to refine our understanding of the temporal dynamics involved in the activation and use of motor information during sentence comprehension. KeywordsEmbodied cognition; Language comprehension; Theory of Event Coding; Simulation; Motor planning A number of recent papers have provided support for the view that the comprehension of language involves the construction of sensorimotor simulations of the objects, actions, and events that are being described. Behavioural studies have shown that both perceptual (e.g., Connell, 2007;Holt & Beilock, 2006;Kaschak et al., 2005;Kaschak, Zwaan, Aveyard, & Yaxley, 2006;Richardson, Spivey, Barsalou, & McRae, 2003;Zwaan, Madden, Yaxley, & Aveyard, 2004;Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002) and motoric (e.g., Borreggine & Kaschak, 2006;Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002;Kaschak & Glenberg, 2000;Zwaan & Taylor, 2006) information is active during the processing of sentences. The behavioural results are complemented by neuroimaging studies showing that the processing of words and sentences involves the activation of the same neural regions that would be involved in actually perceiving or acting with the referent of the words, or engaging in the action depicted in the sentences (e.g.,

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