Abstract
Language and action share similar organizational principles. Both are thought to be hierarchical and recursive in nature. Here we address the relationship between language and action from developmental and neurophysiological perspectives. We discuss three major aspects: The extent of the analogy between language and action; the necessity to extend research on the yet largely neglected aspect of action syntax; the positive contribution of a developmental approach to this topic. We elaborate on the claim that adding an ontogenetic approach will help to obtain a comprehensive picture about both the interplay between language and action and its development, and to answer the question whether the underlying mechanisms of detecting syntactic violations of action sequences are similar to or different from the processing of language syntactic violations.
Highlights
Language and action are fundamental for human social cognition (Repetto, Colombo, & Riva, 2012)
At a general level of description and starting from a general definition of the N400 marker shared between language and action, we propose a dichotomy describing what the two action principles, semantics and syntax might represent in the action domain
In this paper, we focused on the interrelation between language and action
Summary
Laura Maffongelli*,†, Alessandro D’Ausilio‡,§, Luciano Fadiga‡,§ and Moritz M. The non-linear self-administration task (involving a discontinuity in pressing a button with the foot depending on prior finger button press) as opposed to a linear one (involving a linear sequence of finger button presses) resulted in an increased P600 component, reflecting late syntactic processing Taken together, these studies suggest that structural manipulations in both domains activate similar cortical regions of the adult brain (Maffongelli et al, 2015) and that the execution of a motor sequence driven by center-embedded relative clauses may share similar neural resources (Casado et al, 2017). How to further investigate this issue in infants: Proposal for experiments Taking a developmental approach to investigate the onset of the language-action interrelation goes beyond previously suggested comparative studies in adults It allows to explore whether, when, and how brain mechanisms involved in the processing of language and action structure become related. If the observed action sequence presents for example structural incongruences a difference in pupil dilation should be visible compared to when the same action sequence is presented without incongruence
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