Effects of danger, usefulness, and body-object interaction in picture naming

Several previous studies have shown that the time-course of word recognition is determined in part by an interaction between connotations of Danger and Usefulness. A small, mostly separate literature has investigated the role of Body-Object Interaction (BOI) in lexical processing. BOI is defined as the ease with which one can interact with an object. To date the lexical decision study of Van Havermaet and Wurm (2014) is the only study to include all three of these constructs. Stimuli in the current study were black-and-white line drawings corresponding to the common nouns used by Van Havermaet and Wurm (2014). Participants viewed the stimuli one at a time in a random order and had to name them as quickly as possible. Naming times revealed a significant three-way interaction between Danger, Usefulness, and BOI similar to that found for visual lexical decision: The familiar Danger x Usefulness interaction, observed in many previous studies, was observed only for items relatively lower on BOI. The interaction between semantic and embodied processing variables is not restricted to purely linguistic stimuli.