Syntax response–space biases for hands, not feet

Timothy W. Boiteau, Cameron Smith, Amit Almor

A number of studies have shown a relationship between comprehending transitive sentences and spatial processing (e.g., Chatterjee, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(2), 55-61, 2001), in which there is an advantage for responding to images that depict the agent of an action to the left of the patient. Boiteau and Almor (Cognitive Science, 2016) demonstrated that a similar effect is found for pure linguistic information, such that after reading a sentence, identifying a word that had appeared earlier as the agent is faster on the left than on the right, but only for left-hand responses. In this study, we examined the role of lateralized manual motor processes in this effect and found that such spatial effects occur even when only the responses, but not the stimuli, have a spatial dimension. In support of the specific role of manual motor processes, we found a response-space effect with manual but not with pedal responses. Our results support an effector-specific (as opposed to an effector-general) hypothesis: Manual responses showed spatial effects compatible with those in previous research, whereas pedal responses did not. This is consistent with theoretical and empirical work arguing that the hands are generally involved with, and perhaps more sensitive to, linguistic information.