Does visualisation help or hinder concrete word processing?

• Published in: Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) Vol. 74; no. 2; pp. 277 - 294
• Main Authors: Malhi, Simritpal Kaur, Kost, Cassidy, Buchanan, Lori
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.02.2021; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Cognition & reasoning; Emotions; Experiments; Iconicity; Imageability; Time; Vocabulary development; Word processing; Concreteness; abstractness; imageability; embodied cognition; visualisation; iconicity

In an iconicity judgement task, participants were asked whether word pairs were iconic (e.g., nose–tongue; joy–sorrow) or reverse-iconic (e.g., tongue–nose; sorrow–joy), and an advantage for abstract word pairs (i.e., joy–sorrow) was found. Malhi and Buchanan proposed that this reverse concreteness,...