The article, “At the Speed of a Verb: Grammatical Class of Stimuli Affects Response Time in Surveys and Syntactic Classification Tasks” by Marta Witkowska and colleagues, demonstrates that grammar shapes cognitive processing not only through semantic meaning, but through the action-related associations embedded in grammatical form itself. Across four experiments conducted in Italian and Polish, the research team combined unobtrusive survey metadata with controlled laboratory tasks using pseudowords. The findings consistently show that processing or generating verbs—the grammatical class inherently associated with action—significantly accelerates response times compared to nouns. These findings offer important insights for researchers studying language, cognition, agency, and communication, and may also carry practical implications for any context where processing speed and action-readiness are essential, such as the optimization of public messaging, safety alerts, and behavioral prompts.
Publication:
Witkowska, M., Suitner, C., Dołżycka, J., Roessel, J., Maass, A., & Formanowicz, M. (2026). At the speed of a verb: Grammatical class of stimuli affects response time in surveys and syntactic classification tasks. Advance online publication. Journal of Language and Social Psychology.https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X251413715
Open access: https://share.swps.edu.pl/entities/article/3c3ff751-234c-49a8-a9ac-a9a5a503d53e
Referenced projects:
Keywords: nouns; verbs; syntactic classification; agency; pseudowords