Abstract
The aim of our study was to explore the influence of the sensorimotor systems on verbal short-term memory in 6-, 8- and 10-year-old children. For this purpose we manipulated a word property called body-object interaction (BOI). BOI assesses the ease or difficulty with which a human body can physically interact with a word's referent. The children were presented with 10 lists of high-BOI words and 10 lists of low-BOI words. The words were chosen using the BOI ratings compiled by Tillotson et al. (2008) and Bennett et al. (2011). The high- and low-BOI words were matched for length, lexical frequency, and imageability. The children were read the lists. They were subsequently asked to verbally recall the words in correct order. Throughout the experiment half of the children were asked to stand and were permitted to move freely (gesture condition). The other half were asked to sit with both hands on the table and were told to avoid fidgeting (static condition). We observed a significant BOI effect on immediate serial recall in 6-, 8- and 10-year- old children. The advantage for high-BOI words was restricted to item recall with no impact on order recall. We found no effect of the gesture/static condition. Our findings provide evidence for the idea that words involving more sensorimotor knowledge generate a higher level of semantic activation, resulting in an improvement of short-term memory performance. As such, these results are consistent with the embodied cognition approach (e.g., Barsalou, 2008).