The neural blending of words and movement: ERP signatures of semantic and action processes during motor-language coupling

Cervetto, S., Díaz-Rivera, M., Petroni, A., Birba, A., Martorell Caro, M., Sedeño, L., Ibáñez, A. & García, A. M. (2021). The neural blending of words and movement: ERP signatures of semantic and action processes during motor-language coupling. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 33(8), 1413-1427.

En este estudio de potenciales evocados examinamos los correlatos neurofisiológicos de la integración del procesamiento léxico y el movimiento corporal. Nuestros resultados indican que al procesarse verbos compatibles con las acciones realizadas (en particular, verbos de acción manual y acciones manuales), se observan modulaciones distintivas del N400 (marcador de integración semántica) y de potenciales relacionados a procesos motores. Ambos efectos se solapan en una ventana de ∼380–440 ms luego de presentarse la palabra y ∼180 ms antes de ejecutarse la acción. Ese periodo representaría el momento de máxima convergencia entre procesos semánticos y motores durante el acoplamiento del lenguaje y el movimiento.

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The neural blending of words and movement: ERP signatures of semantic and action processes during motor-language coupling

Behavioral embodied research shows that words evoking limb-specific meanings can affect responses performed with the corresponding body part. However, no study has explored this phenomenon’s neural dynamics under implicit processing conditions, let alone by disentangling its conceptual and motoric stages. Here, we examined whether the blending of hand actions and manual action verbs, relative to nonmanual action verbs and nonaction verbs, modulates electrophysiological markers of semantic integration (N400) and motor-related cortical potentials during a lexical decision task. Relative to both other categories, manual action verbs involved reduced posterior N400 amplitude and greater modulations of frontal motor-related cortical potentials. Such effects overlapped in a window of ∼380–440 msec after word presentation and ∼180 msec before response execution, revealing the possible time span in which both semantic and action-related stages reach maximal convergence. These results allow refining current models of motor–language coupling while affording new insights on embodied dynamics at large.

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