title: Playing on the typewriter, typing on the piano: manipulation knowledge of objects.
abstract: Two experiments investigated sensory/motor-based functional knowledge of man-made objects: manipulation features associated with the actual usage of objects. In Experiment 1, a series of prime-target pairs was presented auditorily, and participants were asked to make a lexical decision on the target word. Participants made a significantly faster decision about the target word (e.g. 'typewriter') following a related prime that shared manipulation features with the target (e.g. 'piano') than an unrelated prime (e.g. 'blanket'). In Experiment 2, participants' eye movements were monitored when they viewed a visual display on a computer screen while listening to a concurrent auditory input. Participants were instructed to simply identify the auditory input and touch the corresponding object on the computer display. Participants fixated an object picture (e.g. "typewriter") related to a target word (e.g. 'piano') significantly more often than an unrelated object picture (e.g. "bucket") as well as a visually matched control (e.g. "couch"). Results of the two experiments suggest that manipulation knowledge of words is retrieved without conscious effort and that manipulation knowledge constitutes a part of the lexical-semantic representation of objects.
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Box 1978, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA. jong-yoon_myung@brown.edu
authors.forename: Jong-Yoon
authors.initials: JY
authors.lastname: Myung
authors.forename: Sheila E
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Blumstein
authors.forename: Julie C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Sedivy
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001244:Association; D003463:Cues; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005133:Eye Movements; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D019359:Knowledge; D008297:Male; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014796:Visual Perception