Imagery and comprehension latencies as a function of sentence concreteness and structure

The relation between imagery and comprehension of sentences was investigated in two experiments using reaction time measures. Consistent with predictions from a two-process approach to meaning and mediation, one experiment showed that Ss took longer to generate images to abstract than to concrete sentences, but comprehension latencies did not differ significantly as a function of concreteness. A second experiment showed that sentence processing time (reading, paraphrasing, comprehending, and imaging) generally increased with complexity of either surface structure or deep structure, with some qualification of the effect depending upon how sentence meaning was defined in the instructions given to Ss. Mean imagery and comprehension latencies for sentences were highly correlated (rs = .81 and .83) in both experiments, despite a reversal in overall means; imagery latencies exceeded comprehension latencies in Experiment 1 but were shorter than the latter in Experiment 2.

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