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Related Experiment Videos

Pictures in sentences: understanding without words.

M C Potter, J F Kroll, B Yachzel

    Journal of Experimental Psychology. General
    |September 1, 1986
    PubMed
    Summary

    Sentence comprehension relies on accessing word meanings. This study suggests meanings are stored in a general conceptual system, not a specialized lexical system, impacting how we process language and images.

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    Area of Science:

    • Cognitive Psychology
    • Psycholinguistics
    • Neuroscience

    Background:

    • Understanding sentence meaning involves retrieving and combining word meanings.
    • Two competing hypotheses exist: the lexical hypothesis (meanings in language system) and the conceptual hypothesis (meanings in general conceptual system).
    • Previous research indicates pictures and words are processed similarly in conceptual tasks, but pictures are slower for lexical access.

    Purpose of the Study:

    • To evaluate the lexical versus conceptual hypotheses of word meaning representation.
    • To investigate how replacing words with pictures (rebus sentences) affects sentence comprehension.
    • To determine if sentence meaning is constructed within a specialized lexical system or a general conceptual system.

    Main Methods:

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  • Sentences with pictured objects replacing words (rebus sentences) were presented using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) at 10-12 words/second.
  • Readers judged the plausibility of rebus sentences versus all-word sentences.
  • Picture naming latency and the effect of sentence context were measured (Experiment 4).

    • Main Results:

    • Rebus sentences were judged less plausible than all-word sentences in some experiments, though accuracy and recall were similar.
    • Rebus and all-word sentences were equivalent unless a picture replaced a noun in a familiar phrase.
    • Picture naming latency was longer than word naming, and context affected picture naming but not word naming.

    Conclusions:

    • Results do not support theories of specialized lexical entries for word meanings.
    • Evidence suggests lexical representations point to a nonlinguistic conceptual system for meaning construction.
    • Sentence meaning is likely constructed within a general conceptual system, not a language-specific one.