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. 2025 Jun 4:16:1562351.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1562351. eCollection 2025.

The action-sentence compatibility effect in third person action sentence comprehension

Zhiwei Cai  1 , Bing Qi  2 , Ning Fan  2
Affiliations

The action-sentence compatibility effect in third person action sentence comprehension

Zhiwei Cai et al. Front Psychol. .

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of object animacy and perspective priming on the Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) in third-person action sentences using the sentence sensibility judgment paradigm. Experiment 1 showed that ACE occurred along the front-back axis when the object was an inanimate noun. Experiment 2 revealed that ACE appeared along the left-right axis when the object was a personal name. Experiment 3 demonstrated that ACE aligned with the action's direction under agent priming, while ACE shifted to the opposite direction under patient priming. These findings suggest that participants can flexibly simulate the perspective of an action based on spatial when processing third-person action sentences.

Keywords: ACE; action-sentence comprehension; indexical hypothesis; perceptual symbol systems; third person.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
(A) Front-back axis condition. (B) Left-right axis condition.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Perspective-taking materials used in Erle and Topolinski (2017). Reproduced with permission from the study of Erle and Topolinski (2017).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Experimental setup in experiment 3.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Procedure of experiment 3.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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