Concreteness and imagery in sentence meaning, revisited.

As part of an expanding concern for cognitive psychology, an interest in imagery as an effective symbolic process has ensued. Images and words can be considered as two alternative representations of events, objects or language. Imaginal mediation can be differentiated from verbal mediation by the absence of direct use of words. Drawing specifically on suggestions by Paivio (1971, p. 12), an image can be defined as a nonverbal, spatial or temporal memory code, which represents perception. To the degree that visual imagery is analogous to visual perception, imaginal processing presumably involves parallel processing of information. Processing in this sense refers to that which occurs at storage as well as at retrieval. Verbal processing is functionally linked to the auditory sensory modality and therefore involves sequential processing of information. This is in part due to the syntactic organization of most verbal material and the characteristic left-to-right scanning involved in reading. In contrast, William James (1899) specified that an imaginal object, however complex, is at any one moment thought in one idea, which is aware of all its qualities together