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Updated: May 31, 2026

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects
Published on: November 30, 2018
The comprehension of action-related sentences may cause interference rather than facilitation on matching actions
Manuel de Vega1, Vicente Moreno, Dolores Castillo
1Department of Cognitive Psychology, University of La Laguna, La Laguna, Canary Islands, Spain. mdevega@ull.es
Abstract:
This study used a dual-task paradigm to analyze the time course of motor resonance during the comprehension of action language. In the study, participants read sentences describing a transfer either away from ("I threw the tennis ball to my rival") or toward themselves ("My rival threw me the tennis ball"). When the transfer verb appeared on the screen, and after a variable stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), a visual motion cue (Experiment 1) or a static cue (Experiment 2) prompted participants to move their hand either away from or toward themselves to press a button. The results showed meaning-action interference at short SOAs and facilitation at the longest SOA for the matching conditions. These results support the hypothesis that motor processes associated with the comprehension of action-related language interfere with an overlapping motor task, whereas they facilitate a delayed motor task. These effects are discussed in terms of resonance processes in the motor cortex.
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