Feeling better: Tactile verbs speed up tactile detection

Abstract

Embodiment of action-related language into the motor system has been extensivelydocumented. Yet the case of sensory words, especially referring to touch, remains overlooked.We investigated the influence of verbs denoting tactile sensations on tactile perception. In Experiment 1, participants detected tactile stimulations on their forearm, preceded by tactile or non-tactile verbs by one of three delays (170, 350, 500ms) reflecting different word processing stages. Results revealed shorter reaction times to tactile stimulations following tactile than nontactile verbs, irrespective of delay. To ensure that priming pertained to tactile, and not motor, verb properties, Experiment 2 compared the impact of tactile verbs to both action and nontactile verbs, while stimulations were delivered on the index finger. No priming emerged following action verbs, therefore not supporting the motor-grounded interpretation. Facilitation by tactile verbs was however not observed, possibly owing to methodological changes. Experiment 3, identical to Experiment 2 except that stimulation was delivered to participants' forearm, replicated the priming effect. Importantly, tactile stimulations were detected faster after tactile than after both non-tactile and action verbs, indicating that verbs' tactile properties engaged resources shared with sensory perception. Our findings suggest that language conveying tactile information can activate somatosensory representations and subsequently promote tactile detection.

Kinesthetic motor-imagery training improves performance on lexical-semantic access

“…Nevertheless, while the sentence-picture matching task does involve semantic retrieval [19,56,83], it also may induce semantic interference in participants when pictures and words belong to the same semantic category [56]. The present KMI protocol may have activated semantic representations of body parts related to the actions verbs, which may have exacerbated this interference effect, as semantic-to-motor priming has been documented [84]. In our study, we used sentences rather than words, but the sentences were controlled on various psycholinguistic variables and participants' responses were related to the verb in the sentence.…”

Verbal Labels Facilitate Tactile Texture Discrimination in a Perceptual Learning Task

“…For example, the semantic associations of the verbal label are known to interfere with perception. In the tactile realm, tactile detection improved when the stimulus was preceded by a tactile verb, indicating an interaction between semantic properties of verbal tags and somatosensory processing 43 . Graham et al 44 compared the categorization abilities of children after a training phase in which the stimuli were presented along with nouns, adjectives, or stickers.…”

“…The second question we explored in this study is whether the verbal labels’ grammatical properties exert different effects on perception. On the one hand, pseudoword labels suggesting the mere presence of any redundant verbal label can facilitate categorical perception 10,11,13,42 , but others claim that verbal labels’ effect depends on verbal labels’ properties 43,44 . For example, the semantic associations of the verbal label are known to interfere with perception.…”

Up right, not right up: Primacy of verticality in both language and movement

“…Interestingly, words have also been shown to modulate low-level sensory perception. In a recent study, we revealed the facilitatory influence of reading verbs denoting tactile perception on the speed of detection of tactile stimulations ( Boulenger et al, 2020 ). In the visual domain, Meteyard et al (2007) nicely demonstrated that upward and downward motion verbs reduced perceptual sensitivity for the detection of incongruent vertical motion (see also Richardson et al, 2003 ; Zwaan et al, 2004 ; Kaschak et al, 2005 ; Meteyard et al, 2008 ).…”