The Manipulability Effect in Object Naming

Seeing objects triggers activation of motor areas. The implications of this motor activation in tasks that do not require object-use is still a matter of debate in cognitive sciences. Here we test whether motor activation percolates into the linguistic system by exploring the effect of object manipulability in a speech production task. Italian native speakers name the set of photographs provided by Guérard, Lagacè and Brodeur (Beh Res Meth, 2015). Photographs varied on four motor dimensions concerning on how easily the represented objects can be grasped, moved, or pantomimed, and the number of actions that can be performed with them. The results show classical psycholinguistic phenomena such as the effect of age of acquisition and name agreement in naming latencies. Critically, linear mixed-effects models show an effect of three motor predictors over and above the psycholinguistic effects (replicating, in part, previous findings, Guérard et al., 2015). Further research is needed to address how, and at which level, the manipulability effect emerges in the course of word production.