phenomenon · claim-type · cross-domain-transfer · mechanism · claim-relation · replication-status · limitation — grounded in the full text| phenomenon | masked semantic priming by spatial words— “In six experiments we investigated the nature of masked semantic priming using words referring to the vertical spatial axis (e.g., up, down).” | |
| claim-type | null-result— “Despite extensive testing, we found no evidence that unconsciously perceived words can activate sensorimotor processes, although these words are processed up to the semantic level.” | |
| method — evidence | — “In six experiments we progressively excluded the possibility that action modulation by subliminal words could be explained by (i) short-term stimulus-response associations, (ii) symbolic relationships between prime and targets or (iii) the Evidence Accumulation mechanism.” | |
| mechanism | Sensorimotor activation during comprehension arises from integrating linguistic information with non-linguistic information held in modality-specific cortices, and that integration requires conscious access, so subliminal words stay confined to segregated linguistic networks.— “Embodied effects associated with language comprehension may be the product of a process of integration by which linguistic information (lexical, semantic, syntactic) is” | mechanisms[0] |
| mechanism | Without awareness, processing remains restricted to specialised, segregated neural networks, which is why distant sensorimotor and association areas are not recruited.— “of awareness, information processing may be confined to highly specialized and segregated” | mechanisms[1] |
| mechanism | Primes that are low-prototypical members of their category trigger disembodied centre-surround inhibition, which reverses the sign of masked priming and explains the negative effects reported elsewhere.— “Dudschig et al. (2014) the low prototypicality of the primes may have encouraged” | mechanisms[2] |
| replicates | Ansorge et al. (2010), Experiment 1— “This experiment is a close replication of Ansorge et al. (2010) Experiment 1.” | claim_relations[0] |
| contradicts | Dudschig et al. (2014)— “It is interesting to note that, although these data can be interpreted as consistent with embodied semantics, they are at odds with those reported by Dudschig et al. (2014), who used a similar paradigm: We found a facilitation effect, whereas these authors reported negative priming, that is, incongruent prime-response pairs led to faster RTs… | claim_relations[1] |
| contradicts | the elaborate processing hypothesis (Kunde, Kiesel, & Hoffmann, 2003)— “However, our results stand in contrast to what has been called the “elaborate processing hypothesis” (Kunde, Kiesel, & Hoffmann, 2003), according to which conscious and unconscious words undergo the same levels of semantic processing.” | claim_relations[2] |
| contradicts | radical theories of Embodied Semantics— “These results challenge radical theories of Embodied Semantics by showing that there is no evidence that unconsciously perceived words activate motor programs solely on the basis of their long-term meaning.” | claim_relations[3] |
| sense | A NULL WITH ITS OWN POSITIVE CONTROL, IN THE SAME APPARATUS: `when symbolic and nonsemantic mechanisms were prevented, allowing only for a genuinely embodied semantic priming, no effect was found. Conversely, facilitation emerged in the same experimental paradigm when embodied priming was prevented and symbolic priming was allowed.` Six experiments, and the machine works when you leave the other route open. A failed manipulation cannot selectively succeed - which is the objection every unconscious-priming null has to answer, and this one answers it by construction rather than by argument. Same structure as hesselmann2016 at three times the scale— “The critical finding is that when symbolic and nonsemantic mechanisms were prevented, allowing only for a genuinely embodied semantic priming, no effect was found. Conversely, facilitation emerged in the same experimental paradigm when embodied priming was prevented and symbolic priming was allowed” | senses[0] |
| sense | AND THE LEVEL CLAIM IS EXACT: `we found no evidence that unconsciously perceived words can activate sensorimotor processes, although these words are processed up to the semantic level.` Unconscious words reach meaning and stop before simulation. The `although` is the whole value: this is not a claim that unconscious processing is shallow - the words got to semantics - but that the chain BREAKS at a specific link. A corpus of masked-priming records mostly argues about whether meaning was reached at all; this one grants that and asks what comes after— “we found no evidence that unconsciously perceived words can activate sensorimotor processes, although these words are processed up to the semantic level” | senses[1] |
| sense | AND THE CONCLUSION IS OFFERED AS A CONDITION, NOT A MECHANISM: `We thus conclude that sensorimotor activations might need conscious access to emerge during language understanding.` `might need` is inside the quote. What makes this more than a hedge is that it is falsifiable in an obvious way - show sensorimotor activation from an unconscious word under any conditions and it is gone - and the authors have just spent six experiments failing to do that themselves— “We thus conclude that sensorimotor activations might need conscious access to emerge during language understanding” | senses[2] |
| sense | AND IT SITS AGAINST dehaene1998 IN THIS CORPUS, WITHOUT CONTRADICTING IT. dehaene1998 concluded that an unreportable numeral was `unconsciously processed according to task instructions, ALL THE WAY DOWN TO THE MOTOR SYSTEM`. This paper finds no sensorimotor activation from unconscious words at all. Both can be right, because `reaches the motor system` names two things: dehaene1998's is a TRAINED RESPONSE MAPPING - a digit compared to 5, a hand prepared, an arbitrary rule applied - and Bottini's is SIMULATION OF MEANING, the claim that understanding `up` re-enacts upward experience. An unconscious stimulus can drive the first and fail the second. Same shape as the two senses of `nonconscious`, and the corpus currently indexes both pairs under one heading— “we found no evidence that unconsciously perceived words can activate sensorimotor processes, although these words are processed up to the semantic level” | senses[3] |
| control | the response keys were always described by COLOUR (green or red, counterbalanced across subjects) and never by spatial position — held — rules out that the effect is spatial stimulus-response compatibility rather than semantic priming— “Instructions always referred to the keys in terms of their color (green or red; counterbalanced across subjects) and never in terms of spatial coordinates (e.g. upper/lower key).” | controls[0] |
| control | a practice block of 32 trials preceded the experiment — held — rules out that early experimental trials are contaminated by learning the task— “Before starting with the experiment, each participant received a practice block of 32 trials.” | controls[1] |
| note | embodied semantic priming —contrasted-with→ symbolic priming — THE CONTRAST IS THE EXPERIMENT. The two routes are pitted against each other by closing one and opening the other in the same paradigm, and the asymmetry of the result - null for embodied, facilitation for symbolic - is the paper. Weight 0.95: explicit in the quote, and the design exists for nothing else.— “The critical finding is that when symbolic and nonsemantic mechanisms were prevented, allowing only for a genuinely embodied semantic priming, no effect was found. Conversely, facilitation emerged in the same experimental paradigm when embodied priming was prevented and symbolic priming was allowed” | concept_edges[0] |
| weight | embodied semantic priming —contrasted-with→ symbolic priming — 0.95— “The critical finding is that when symbolic and nonsemantic mechanisms were prevented, allowing only for a genuinely embodied semantic priming, no effect was found. Conversely, facilitation emerged in the same experimental paradigm when embodied priming was prevented and symbolic priming was allowed” | concept_edges[0] |
| outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation) | control — held | controls[0] |
| outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation) | control — held | controls[1] |
| replication | untested | |
| limitation | Prime duration and stimulus onset asynchrony were confounded, so the paper cannot say which drove the effect.— “Our data cannot distinguish which of these factors is really driving the effect, since SOA and prime duration covary in this experiment.” | limitations[0] |
| limitation | Why this paper found facilitation where Dudschig et al. found inhibition is left unresolved and handed to future work.— “Future studies are needed to determine whether negative semantic priming like that observed by Dudschig and colleagues is a signature of embodied mechanisms or can be entirely explained in symbolic terms.” | limitations[1] |
finding · quantity · variable · definition · key-term — grounded in the full text| finding | In Experiment 2 no priming effect emerged with spatial words.— “The results of Experiment 2 show that no priming effect emerges with spatial words” | content_tags.findings[0] |
| finding | EVIDENCE CORRECTED (RE-GROUNDED - THE POINTER WAS WRONG, NOT THE CLAIM) · Experiment 3 raised the prime duration from 33 to 50 ms to test whether priming emerges while primes stay outside awareness.— “In Experiment 3 we increased the duration of the prime display from 33ms to 50ms, so as to see whether a slightly longer presentation time allows for symbolic and/or embodied priming to emerge, while remaining outside awareness.” | content_tags.findings[1] |
| retracted | finding — RE-GROUNDED - THE POINTER WAS WRONG, NOT THE CLAIM. The old evidence was verbatim, anchored and correctly cut, and it contained NONE of this claim's numbers (33, 50). The paper states the claim in one sentence elsewhere and the tagger did not use it. the project, 2026-08-23: 'WE HAVE SPENT THE DAY VERIFYING THAT QUOTES ARE REAL AND NONE OF IT ASKS WHETHER THEY ARE RELEVANT.' Confirmed by reading the claim, the old span and the candidate together; the candidate carries every number AND the claim's own content words. | content_tags.findings[1] |
| finding | Primes and targets need not be semantically related for an effect to appear.— “(iii) It is not necessary for primes and targets to be semantically related in order to see an effect” | content_tags.findings[2] |
| finding | When the task made the response mapping non-spatial so that only embodied priming could operate, no priming appeared at all — neither facilitation nor inhibition.— “When Embodied Priming is the only mechanism by which an effect could arise, there is no priming effect (neither facilitatory nor inhibitory; E5).” | content_tags.findings[3] |
| finding | In the identical paradigm with gender primes and gender symbols, where embodiment was impossible but evidence accumulation was possible, facilitatory priming reappeared.— “When Evidence Accumulation and Source Confusion is the only mechanism by which an effect could arise, priming does emerge, and it is facilitatory (E6).” | content_tags.findings[4] |
| finding | The pattern gives a case where unconscious words are processed semantically yet activate no sensorimotor representation, so motor activation is not an automatic or necessary part of semantic processing.— “Thus, motor activation is not an automatic and necessary part of semantic processing, i.e., there is at least one condition (lack of awareness) where we see semantic processing, but no sensorimotor activation.” | content_tags.findings[5] |
| quantity | 695ms vs 714ms — mean RT for congruent versus incongruent trials in Experiment 1, the baseline replication— “were faster (mean RT= 695ms) than in the incongruent condition (mean RT= 714ms).” | content_tags.quantities[0] |
| quantity | p= 0.28 — the null congruity effect in Experiment 2, where primes and targets came from separate word sets— “Congruity, F(1, 21)= 1.22, p= 0.28, η2 = 0.05, no effect of Movement Direction, F(1, 21)=” | content_tags.quantities[1] |
| quantity | p= 0.41 — the null congruity effect in Experiment 5, the condition that isolated embodied priming— “There was no main effect of Congruity, F(1,31)= 0.68, p= 0.41, η2= .021, a (trivial) main effect of Response” | content_tags.quantities[2] |
| quantity | 5 ms — size of the congruity effect for the faster half of RTs in Experiment 6, where only symbolic evidence-accumulation priming was possible— “faster RTs (5 ms; F(1,31)= 18.61, p< .001, η2= 0.37), but absent for slower RTs (-1 ms; F(1,31)= 0.41, p= .53, η2 = 0.01).” | content_tags.quantities[3] |
| quantity | 0.04, SD= 0.27 — mean d-prime for prime visibility in Experiment 1, not different from zero— “The average d-prime value was very low overall (mean= 0.04, SD= 0.27), and it was not significantly different from zero (t(23)= 0.68, p= 0.5).” | content_tags.quantities[4] |
| quantity | 480 trials — number of experimental trials each participant completed— “The experiment consisted of 480 trials. Before starting with the experiment, each” | content_tags.quantities[5] |
| quantity | Twenty-four — number of participants recruited for Experiment 1— “Twenty-four university students at Milano Bicocca (18F, mean age=25 years)” | content_tags.quantities[6] |
| variable | Congruity (independent)— “(prime congruent with response movement vs. prime incongruent with response movement)” | content_tags.variables[0] |
| variable | duration of the prime display (independent)— “Draine & Abrams, 1996). In Experiment 3 we increased the duration of the prime display” | content_tags.variables[1] |
| variable | response time (dependent)— “were faster (mean RT= 695ms) than in the incongruent condition (mean RT= 714ms).” | content_tags.variables[2] |
| variable | error rate (dependent)— “An ANOVA on the arc-sine transformed error rates revealed a main effect of Congruity, F(1, 23)= 6.57, p= 0.02, η2= 0.22, indicating that participants were more accurate in congruent trials compared to incongruent ones (99.4% vs. 99.0%).” | content_tags.variables[3] |
| variable | response speed (covariate)— “all the experiments, we kept response speed as a covariate in our analyses, as in the previous” | content_tags.variables[4] |
| variable | orientation of the colored buttons (control)— “orientation of the colored buttons was counterbalanced between participants such that the green button was on the bottom for half of the participants and on the top for the other half of participants.” | content_tags.variables[6] |
| variable | number of syllables (control)— “matched for number of syllables and frequency of occurrence (4.98 ± .91 vs. 4.77 ± .84; data are taken from SUTBLEX–IT, Crepaldi, Amenta, Mandera, Keuleers, & Brysbaert, 2015, and are expressed in Zipf units, Van Heuven, Mandera, Keuleers, & Brysbaert, 2014).” | content_tags.variables[7] |
| variable | frequency of occurrence (control)— “matched for number of syllables and frequency of occurrence (4.98 ± .91 vs. 4.77 ± .84; data are taken from SUTBLEX–IT, Crepaldi, Amenta, Mandera, Keuleers, & Brysbaert, 2015, and are expressed in Zipf units, Van Heuven, Mandera, Keuleers, & Brysbaert, 2014).” | content_tags.variables[8] |
| definition | masked priming— “In a typical masked priming experiment, a prime is presented briefly,” | content_tags.definitions[0] |
| definition | spreading activation account— “easier to process a related target due to spreading activation from one node to nearby nodes” | content_tags.definitions[1] |
| definition | source confusion— “source confusion, and the evidence accumulated via the prime is used to validate the hypothesis over the target.” | content_tags.definitions[2] |
| definition | Stimulus-Response Mapping mechanism— “According to the Stimulus-Response Mapping mechanisms, the prime can induce facilitation by directly activating the response action required by the target (e.g., pressing a left or right key), by virtue of some short–term, ad–hoc association created by the… | content_tags.definitions[3] |
| definition | Embodied Priming | content_tags.definitions[4] |
| definition | d-prime | content_tags.definitions[5] |
| concept | embodied semantic priming — not defined in this paper's own words; the claim under test: that understanding a word re-enacts the sensorimotor experience of its referent, and that this happens automatically enough to occur unconsciously. The route that produced NO effect once the other two were closed off | concepts[0] |
| concept | symbolic priming — not defined in this paper's own words; the disembodied alternative - association between word forms and meanings with no simulation. The route that DID produce facilitation, in the same paradigm, which is what makes the embodied null interpretable rather than a failed experiment | concepts[1] |
| concept | sensorimotor — not defined in this paper's own words; what Embodied Semantics says must activate during comprehension - and what these six experiments could not detect from unconscious words, though the words reached meaning | concepts[2] |
| concept | conscious access — not defined in this paper's own words; the condition the authors end up proposing: simulation may require it, even though semantic processing does not. A boundary drawn between two levels that the unconscious priming literature usually treats as one chain Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher. | concepts[3] |
| ANOVA | as written: A 2–by–2 ANOVA on the log-transformed RTs Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher. | content_tags.statistics[0] |
| effect size η2 | as written: η2 = 0.649 Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher. | content_tags.statistics[1] |
| t-test t | as written: not significantly different from zero (t(23)= 0.68, p= 0.5) Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher. | content_tags.statistics[2] |
| correlation r | as written: were not correlated (r = 0.13) Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher. | content_tags.statistics[3] |
| regression | as written: we regressed priming against d–prime Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher. | content_tags.statistics[4] |
| standard deviation SD | as written: more than 2 standard deviations from each participant’s mean Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher. | content_tags.statistics[5] |
| median split | as written: a subject-wise median split Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher. | content_tags.statistics[6] |
| confidence interval CI | as written: the 95% Confidence Interval (CI) of the regression line at the origin Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher. | content_tags.statistics[7] |
| arcsine transformation | as written: ANOVA on the arc-sine transformed error rates Quotation withheld — this paper is not ours to reproduce, and the page has already quoted as much of it as the rights layer allows. The tag, its field and its confidence stand; the sentence is at the publisher. | content_tags.statistics[8] |
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