Automatic ultrarapid activation and inhibition of cortical motor systems in spoken word comprehension

Summary, in English

To address the hotly debated question of motor system involvement in language comprehension, we recorded neuromagnetic responses elicited in the human brain by unattended action-related spoken verbs and nouns and scrutinized their timecourse and neuroanatomical substrates. We found that already very early on, from similar to 80 ms after disambiguation point when the words could be identified from the available acoustic information, both verbs and nouns produced characteristic somatotopic activations in the motor strip, with words related to different body parts activating the corresponding body representations. Strikingly, along with this category-specific activation, we observed suppression of motor-cortex activation by competitor words with incompatible semantics, documenting operation of the neurophysiological principles of lateral/surround inhibition in neural word processing. The extremely early onset of these activations and deactivations, their emergence in the absence of attention, and their similar presence for words of different lexical classes strongly suggest automatic involvement of motor-specific circuits in the perception of action-related language.

• Author: Yury Shtyrov; Anna Butorina; Anastasia Nikolaeva; Tatiana Stroganova
• Department/s: General Linguistics
• Publishing year: 2014
• Language: English
• Pages: 1918-1923
• Publication/Series: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• Volume: 111
• Issue: 18
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1323158111
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: National Academy of Sciences
• Topic: General Language Studies and Linguistics
• Keywords: embodied cognition; lexical semantics; magnetoencephalography; MEG; mismatch negativity
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 1091-6490