Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Comprehending action language recruits the action system. To what extent do action simulations reflect the fine-grained parameters of real world action? We investigate whether action simulations are sensitive to speed of an action. In two experiments participants completed a motor task where they moved slowly or quickly, followed by a sentence sensibility task. We found an overall action effect for sentences describing hand actions: moving slowly increased accuracy (Exp.1) and reduced response time (Exp. 2). For sentences describing full-body actions, responses were more accurate when movement speed matched the speed implied in the sentence, in Experiment 1 only. This study demonstrates online action simulation and provides evidence that speed of action can be simulated during sentence comprehension.