Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

For modal approaches to conceptualization, concepts are couched by a corpus of cognitive processes such as perception,language, and action. Motor verbs offer an opportunity to evaluate the automatic onset of a clear spatial and modalcomponent in the mental representations of linguistic items. This study aimed to test the automaticity of these spatialcomponents when processing the meaning of concrete motor verbs. In one eye-tracking experiment, 31 participants viewed144 Spanish rebug sentences (i.e. escurrir ) with four schematic pictures (left, right, up, down) by a visual word paradigm.The study registered more and larger visits on the schematic pictures related to the motor and perceptive experience whendoing the action refereed by the verbs. Mainly, these findings add evidence on the automaticity of the modal componentof mental representations and help to understand how this component is ingrained in language for action meaning.