DO THE EFFECTS OF LANGUAGE ON PERCEPTION DEPEND ON HEIGHT?

Abstract

When you read stories or scenarios, does it cause you to imagine what is being described? If so, does that imagery look similar across individuals, or does it depend on the physical and perceptual experiences a person has had? This study tests whether an individual's height affects how they understand the language that they read. The participants in this study were separated into two between-subjects conditions. Half the participants read a story that could be interpreted differently by tall and short people (a story about hanging coats on a rod), and the other half of the participants read a story that was neutral with respect to the height of the participant (taking payments at a register). Participants were then followed up by an ambiguous bird image that could be interpreted as facing upward or downward, and they had to interpret it based on where they thought the beak was located on the image. Participants also provided their height so that we could test whether height predicted the direction in which understanding language affected perception. The results of this study showed that height did play a factor in how people interpreted the facing direction of the bird after reading the height-dependent story, but not after reading the height-independent story. However, these results were noisy, so more work is needed to better understand the role that perceptual experience plays in language comprehension.