Instrument inferences and verb schemata

Five studies employed a Stroop paradigm to examine the activation of instruments in sentence comprehension. Two types of instruments were studied, tools (e.g., spoon, hammer) and body parts (e.g., hand, wing). For example, is the concept “broom” activated by the sentence “The man swept the floor,” or is the concept “wing” activated by the sentence “The duck flew over the pond”? Earlier studies have suggested that implicit instruments are not encoded in the underlying representation of a sentence during comprehension. The first four studies in the present paper reveal no evidence that abstract knowledge of the instruments is even activated. In the fifth study, the Stroop task reveals an effect if subjects are instructed to generate implicit instruments, although a facilitatory (rather than an inhibitory) effect is obtained.

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