The Processing of Color Words in Sentence Comprehension

This study investigated how color is represented in language comprehension. Some theories suggest that perceptual simulations—activations of sensory features such as shape, size, or color—routinely support understanding during reading. One line of evidence is the “mismatch effect” in sentence-picture verification tasks: responses are slower when pictures mismatch perceptual details described in the sentence. Across three preregistered experiments ( N = 222), we tested whether this mismatch effect occurs with explicit color words (Experiment 1) and whether background colors presented concurrently interfere with the mental simulation of color to test the functionality of mental simulations in language comprehension (Experiments 2 and 3). As expected, participants responded faster when pictures matched the sentence’s color across the three experiments. When conflicting background colors were introduced during sentence presentation, the mismatch effect remained unaffected. This pattern of findings suggests that colors are routinely activated through color words during comprehension, but the functional role of perceptual simulations of color for comprehension remains unclear.