Language comprehenders have been arguing to mentally represent the implied orientation of objects. However, compared to the effects of shape, size, and color, the effect of orientation is rather small. We examined a potential explanation for the relatively low magnitude of the orientation effect: Object size moderates the orientation effect. Theoretical considerations led us to predict a smaller orientation effect for small objects than for large objects in a sentence-picture verification task. We furthermore investigated whether this pattern generalizes across languages (Chinese, Dutch, and English) and tasks (picture-naming task). The results of the verification task show an orientation effect overall, which is not moderated by object size (contrary to our hypothesis) and language (consistent with our hypothesis). Meanwhile, the preregistered picture-picture verification task showed the predicted interaction between object size and orientation effect. We conducted exploratory analyses to address additional questions.

中文翻译：

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对象大小是否与对象定向的心理模拟有关？

语言理解者一直在争论从心理上代表物体的隐含方位。但是，与形状，大小和颜色的影响相比，定向的影响很小。我们研究了定向效应幅度相对较低的潜在解释：对象大小可缓和定向效应。理论上的考虑使我们在句子图片验证任务中预测的较小对象的定向效果小于较大对象的定向效果。我们进一步调查了这种模式是否在语言（中文，荷兰语和英语）和任务（图片命名任务）中得到了推广。验证任务的结果总体上显示了方向性效果，该效果没有受到对象大小（与我们的假设相反）和语言（与我们的假设一致）的影响。与此同时，预先注册的图片验证任务显示了对象尺寸和方向效果之间的预测相互作用。我们进行了探索性分析，以解决其他问题。