Conceptual processing of action verbs with and without motor representations

ABSTRACT

Reading an action verb activates its corresponding motor representation in the reader’s motor cortex, but whether this activation is relevant for comprehension remains unclear. To quantify the contribution of motor representations to the conceptual processing of action verbs, we measured the efficiency of two participants with atypical motor experience due to congenitally severely reduced upper limbs in processing verbs referring to actions that they had previously executed (e.g., writing) or not (e.g., shoveling) and compared the efficiency difference between the two verb categories to that found in typical participants, who had previously executed all these actions. This allowed measuring the contribution of motor representations unbiased by confounded low-level, lexical and semantic variables. Although the task was sensitive and the participants’ performance was positively influenced by the richness of the words’ conceptual representations, we found no detectable advantage for words associated with motor representations.

KEYWORDS:

• Verbs
• concepts
• semantic knowledge
• limb aplasia

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to all the participants to this study. We declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. This research was supported by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Trento e Rovereto (Societa’ Mente Cervello), the Provincia Autonoma di Trento and the Harvard Society for Mind, Brain and Behavior.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

The study was approved by the biomedical ethics committee of the Cliniques Universitaires Saint-Luc, Brussels, Belgium and all participants gave written informed consent prior to the study.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Mendeley Data at https://doi.org/10.17632/ckn7rd8z69.1. Reference: Vannuscorps, Gilles (2019), “Conceptual processing of action verbs with and without motor representations”, Mendeley Data, v1.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Società Scienze Mente Cervello–Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Trento e Rovereto, by a grant from the Provincia Autonoma di Trento, and by a Harvard Provostial postdoctoral fund (to A.C.); Harvard Society for Mind, Brain and Behavior.