# Grounding verbs in action: The facilitative effect of potential physical interactions with verbs

## TL;DR

This study shows that action verbs with more physical interactions are processed faster, supporting the idea that verb meanings are grounded in sensory-motor experiences.

## Contribution

A new measure called potential physical interactions (PPI) was developed to assess grounded cognition effects for action verbs.

## Key findings

- Words with higher PPI ratings were responded to more rapidly in lexical decisions.
- The findings were replicated using data from the English Lexicon Project.

## Abstract

Grounded cognition holds that a word’s semantic representation is grounded in sensory-motor experiences. Much research has supported this account in relation to nouns, but less is known about verbs. The current research was designed to test the effect of grounded cognition with relation to action verbs. Accordingly, we developed a measure labeled potential physical interactions (PPI) aimed at capturing grounded content by measuring the number of physical objects an action verb can interact with. We first collected PPI ratings from 177 university students. Following this, a different group of 40 university students made lexical decisions to the words. The results indicate that words higher in PPI are responded to more rapidly than are those lower in PPI. We replicated this finding with data from the English Lexicon Project. The findings support the claim that the semantic representation of action verbs is grounded in sensory-motor experience.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13423-025-02776-5.