Embodied Verbal Semantics: Evidence from an Image-Verb Matching Task

Abstract

It has recently been demonstrated that certain neural circuitry involved in the execution of specific motor actions is also used when the very same motor actions are observed or when language describing those actions is perceived. In humans, the pre-motor cortex is organized into regions that are involved in the execution and observation of actions performed by at least the following three general areas: the mouth, the hand, and the leg. The discovery of this “mirror system”, involved in production and perception of motor behavior, leads to a viable hypothesis about the processing of linguistic units that refer to these actions. It could be that understanding a verb describing an action involves the activation of the very same mirror circuitry involved in performing and recognizing that action. This hypothesis is tested in a matching task, in which subjects were presented first with an image depicting some action, followed by a verb that either described that action or did not. They were asked to decide as quickly as possible whether the verb was appropriate to the image. It was reasoned that if the verbs and images for particular actions recruited the same mirror circuitry, then there should be interference in those cases where the actions described by the verb and image were not the same but used the same effector. The results showed that it took subjects significantly longer to reject non-matching verbs and images when the two shared an effector than when they did not. These results support the hypothesis that understanding action language requires the activation of effector-specific neural circuitry in the human mirror system.

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