Abstract
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.
•Three experiments explored effects of hand- or foot-associated action verbs on the speed of hand and foot responses.•Task (perceptual vs linguistic) and action verb task relevance were varied across conditions.•Hand and foot responses were generally faster in the presence of a verb associated with the responding limb.•These congruence effects were very sensitive to action verb task relevance and somewhat sensitive to task type.•We conclude that the congruence effects do not result from fully automatic verb processing.