Abstract
The involvement of the sensorimotor system in language understanding has been widely demonstrated. However, the role of context in these studies has only recently started to be addressed. Though words are bearers of a semantic potential, meaning is the product of a pragmatic process. It needs to be situated in a context to be disambiguated. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that embodied simulation occurring during linguistic processing is contextually modulated to the extent that the same sentence, depending on the context of utterance, leads to the activation of different effector-specific brain motor areas. In order to test this hypothesis, we asked subjects to give a motor response with the hand or the foot to the presentation of ambiguous idioms containing action-related words when these are preceded by context sentences. The results directly support our hypothesis only in relation to the comprehension of hand-related action sentences.
Highlights
In the last years many empirical findings have shown the involvement of the sensorimotor system in language understanding [1,2,3]
Neuroimaging [15,16,17,18], and neurophysiological studies, the latter realized by means of Transcranic Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) [8, 13, 19, 20], have widely revealed activation of the motor cortex when participants of the studies read or listened to action-related language
Authors of this study showed that the comprehension of indirect requests, for example the sentence ‘‘It is hot here’’ uttered in a room with a window and interpreted as a request to open the window, activates the motor system much more reliably than the comprehension of the same sentence uttered in a different context, e.g. in the desert, and interpreted as a statement
Summary
In the last years many empirical findings have shown the involvement of the sensorimotor system in language understanding [1,2,3]. Context and Embodied Simulation described in terms of operations on amodal and abstract symbols proposed by classic cognitivists [4, 5] In this regard, behavioural studies revealed a facilitation effect between the processing of action-related words or sentences and the performance of concurrent and compatible motor acts [6,7,8,9]. Neuroimaging [15,16,17,18], and neurophysiological studies, the latter realized by means of Transcranic Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) [8, 13, 19, 20], have widely revealed activation of the motor cortex when participants of the studies read or listened to action-related language These studies showed that motor activations elicited by processing of action words and sentences follow a somatotopic organization
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