Motor Resonance and Linguistic Focus

Abstract

Previous studies have demonstrated that verbal descriptions of actions activate compatible motor responses (Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002; Zwaan & Taylor, 2006). The present study replicates previous findings showing that, within a sentence, such activation is localized on the verb that denotes the action. Moreover, motor resonance is found to yield to linguistic focus. If a postverbal adverb maintains focus on a matching action ("slowly" or "quickly"), motor resonance occurs, but if the adverb shifts the focus to the agent (e.g., "obediently" or "eagerly"), a cessation of motor resonance ensues. These findings are discussed within the context of theories of motor resonance, action understanding, mental simulation, and linguistic focus.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 162 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.