THE MEANING OF LANGUAGE AS EMBODIED REPRESENTATIONS IN THE BRAIN

de Vega M

La Laguna University

Every time we understand a sentence we activate a complex circuitry in the brain. It is well known that perisylvian areas in the left hemisphere are activated to encode features of words and sentences (Wernicke area) as well as executing speech (Broca area). Recently, psychologists and neuroscientist have also reported that other regions in the sensory-motor cortex are selectively activated to represent linguistic meaning. For instance, verbs describing actions of hands (grasping), mouth (blowing), or foot (jumping) activate somatotopic areas in the brain that partially overlap those involved in planning the corresponding actions. Behavioral and neurological data in our own laboratory support and qualify this view. Thus, sentences describing a transfer action away from you (I gave you a book) or towards you (you gave me a book) interact with simultaneous hand motions that match or mismatch the implicit motion of the sentence. This so-called action-sentence compatibility effect was observed even with very abstract sentences (If it had been your birthday I would have given you a book). In an fMRI experiment we gave participants sentences in which the “effort” was manipulated by combining action verbs with objects differing in weight (e.g., pushing the chair vs. pushing the piano). High-effort sentences activated premotor and parietal areas implicit in action planning, and related to the mirror-neuron system, to a larger extend than low-effort sentences. These experiments suggest that the neural bases of meaning consist of activating embodied simulations of experience rather than abstract symbols. In addition, these studies can contribute to better understand the language deficits observed in Parkinson, Alzheimer, and other brain patients.