Abstract
Grounded cognition theories suggest that conceptual representations essentially depend on modality-specific sensory and motor systems. Feature-specific brain activation across different feature types such as action or audition has been intensively investigated in nouns, while feature-specific conceptual category differences in verbs mainly focused on body part specific effects. The present work aimed at assessing whether feature-specific event-related potential (ERP) differences between action and sound concepts, as previously observed in nouns, can also be found within the word class of verbs. In Experiment 1, participants were visually presented with carefully matched sound and action verbs within a lexical decision task, which provides implicit access to word meaning and minimizes strategic access to semantic word features. Experiment 2 tested whether pre-activating the verb concept in a context phase, in which the verb is presented with a related context noun, modulates subsequent feature-specific action vs. sound verb processing within the lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, ERP analyses revealed a differential ERP polarity pattern for action and sound verbs at parietal and central electrodes similar to previous results in nouns. Pre-activation of the meaning of verbs in the preceding context phase in Experiment 2 resulted in a polarity-reversal of feature-specific ERP effects in the lexical decision task compared with Experiment 1. This parallels analogous earlier findings for primed action and sound related nouns. In line with grounded cognitions theories, our ERP study provides evidence for a differential processing of action and sound verbs similar to earlier observation for concrete nouns. Although the localizational value of ERPs must be viewed with caution, our results indicate that the meaning of verbs is linked to different neural circuits depending on conceptual feature relevance.
Highlights
It is widely accepted that concepts constitute the meaning of words pertaining to different lexical classes such as nouns and verbs (Levelt, 1989; Pulvermüller, 1999; Schomers et al, 2015)
Experiment 2 tested whether pre-activating the verb concept in a context phase, in which the verb is presented with a related context noun, modulates subsequent feature-specific action vs. sound verb processing within the lexical decision task
Post-hoc tests showed that this effect was based on significant event-related potential (ERP) differences between sound verbs compared to action (p = 0.025) and control verbs (p = 0.03)
Summary
It is widely accepted that concepts constitute the meaning of words pertaining to different lexical classes such as nouns and verbs (Levelt, 1989; Pulvermüller, 1999; Schomers et al, 2015). Conceptual information is represented in an abstract-symbolic format (Collins and Loftus, 1975; Pylyshyn, 1980; Anderson, 1983; Mahon and Caramazza, 2009), supposedly in heteromodal brain areas within anterior (Patterson et al, 2007; Visser et al, 2010) and posterior temporal cortex (de Zubicaray et al, 2001; Gold et al, 2006), which serve as amodal semantic hubs. In support of amodal views of conceptual memory, semantic word processing has been shown to depend on anterior temporal areas (Patterson et al, 2007) as well as on left posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) irrespective of the semantic category or presentation format (Devereux et al, 2013; Fairhall and Caramazza, 2013; Anderson et al, 2015)
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