Influences of task and attention on action verb congruence effects: How automatic are embodiment effects?

Three experiments investigated changes in the sizes of Stroop-like congruency effects of hand- and foot-related action verbs on the latencies of hand and foot motor responses. Congruency effects were present in all experiments, with faster responses for a verb associated with the responding limb than for a verb associated with the opposite limb (e.g., faster foot than hand responses in the presence of the verb "kick"). As compared with a task in which the verbs were completely irrelevant, this congruency effect was greatly increased when participants had to make lexical decisions about the verbs, and the effect was also increased-although to a lesser extent-when participants had to make physical (i.e., size) judgments about them. In some cases, the congruence effect was also larger when the hand/foot discrimination response was determined by a reading task than by a color discrimination task. We conclude that the Stroop-like congruence effects of action verbs do not result from fully automatic processing but instead depend on at least the duration and linguistic nature of verb processing.