On Mental Imagery in Lexical Processing: Computational Modeling of the Visual Load Associated to Concepts

This paper investigates the notion of visual load, an es- timate for a lexical item’s efficacy in activating mental images associated with the concept it refers to. We elab- orate on the centrality of this notion which is deeply and variously connected to lexical processing. A com- putational model of the visual load is introduced that builds on few low level features and on the dependency structure of sentences. The system implementing the proposed model has been experimentally assessed and shown to reasonably approximate human response.