Grip Force Reveals the Context Sensitivity of Language-Induced Motor Activity during “Action Words

Studies demonstrating the involvement of motor brain structures in language processing typically focus on \ud time windows beyond the latencies of lexical-semantic access. Consequently, such studies remain inconclusive regarding whether motor brain structures are recruited directly in language processing or through post-linguistic conceptual imagery. In the present study, we introduce a grip-force sensor that allows online measurements of language-induced motor activity during sentence listening. We use this tool to investigate whether language-induced motor activity remains constant or is modulated in negative, as opposed to affirmative, linguistic contexts. Our findings demonstrate that this simple experimental paradigm can be used to study the online crosstalk between language and the motor systems in an ecological and economical manner. Our data further confirm that the motor brain structures that can be called upon during action word processing are not mandatorily involved; the crosstalk is asymmetrically\ud governed by the linguistic context and not vice versa

Gesturing Meaning: Non-action Words Activate the Motor System

Across cultures, speakers produce iconic gestures, which add – through the movement of the speakers’ hands – a pictorial dimension to the speakers’ message. These gestures capture not only the motor content but also the visuospatial content of the message. Here, we provide first evidence for a direct link between the representation of perceptual information and the motor system that can account for these observations. Across four experiments, participants’ hand movements captured both shapes that were directly perceived, and shapes that were only implicitly activated by unrelated semantic judgments of object words. These results were obtained even though the objects were not associated with any motor behaviors that would match the gestures the participants had to produce. Moreover, implied shape affected not only gesture selection processes but also their actual execution – as measured by the shape of hand motion through space – revealing intimate links between implied shape representation and motor output. The results are discussed in terms of ideomotor theories of action and perception, and provide one avenue for explaining the ubiquitous phenomenon of iconic gestures

Using affective knowledge to generate and validate a set of emotion-related, action words

Emotion concepts are built through situated experience. Abstract word meaning is grounded in this affective knowledge, giving words the potential to evoke emotional feelings and reactions (e.g., Vigliocco et al., 2009). In the present work we explore whether words differ in the extent to which they evoke ‘specific’ emotional knowledge. Using a categorical approach, in which an affective ‘context’ is created, it is possible to assess whether words proportionally activate knowledge relevant to different emotional states (e.g., ‘sadness’, ‘anger’, Stevenson, Mikels & James, 2007a). We argue that this method may be particularly effective when assessing the emotional meaning of action words (e.g., Schacht & Sommer, 2009). In study 1 we use a constrained feature generation task to derive a set of action words that participants associated with six, basic emotional states (see full list in Appendix S1). Generation frequencies were taken to indicate the likelihood that the word would evoke emotional knowledge relevant to the state to which it had been paired. In study 2 a rating task was used to assess the strength of association between the six most frequently generated, or ‘typical’, action words and corresponding emotion labels. Participants were presented with a series of sentences, in which action words (typical and atypical) and labels were paired e.g., “If you are feeling ‘sad’ how likely would you be to act in the following way?” … ‘cry.’ Findings suggest that typical associations were robust. Participants always gave higher ratings to typical vs. atypical action word and label pairings, even when (a) rating direction was manipulated (the label or verb appeared first in the sentence), and (b) the typical behaviours were to be performed by the rater themselves, or others. Our findings suggest that emotion-related action words vary in the extent to which they evoke knowledge relevant for different emotional states. When measuring affective grounding, it may then be appropriate to use categorical ratings in conjunction with unimodal measures, which assess the ‘magnitude’ to which words evoke feelings (e.g., Newcombe et al., 2012). Towards this aim we provide a set of emotion-related action words, accompanied by generation frequency and rating data, which show how strongly each word evokes knowledge relevant to basic emotional states

Representing meaning: a feature-based model of object and action words

The representation of word meaning has received substantial attention in the psycholinguistic literature over the past decades, yet the vast majority of studies have been limited to words referring to concrete objects. The aim of the present work is to provide a theoretically and neurally plausible model of lexical-semantic representations, not only for words referring to concrete objects but also for words referring to actions and events using a common set of assumptions across domains. In order to do so, features of meaning are generated by naïve speakers, and used as a window into important aspects of representation. A first series of analyses test how the meanings of words of different types are reflected in features associated with different modalities of sensory-motor experience, and how featural properties may be related to patterns of impairment in language-disordered populations. The features of meaning are then used to generate a model of lexical-semantic similarity, in which these different types of words are represented within a single system, under the assumption that lexical-semantic representations serve to provide an interface between conceptual knowledge derived in part from sensory-motor experience, and other linguistic information such as syntax, phonology and orthography. Predictions generated from this model are tested in a series of behavioural experiments designed to test two main questions: whether similarity measures based on speaker- generated features can predict fine-grained semantic similarity effects, and whether the predictive quality of the model is comparable for words referring to objects and words referring to actions. The results of five behavioural experiments consistently reveal graded semantic effects as predicted by the feature-based model, of similar magnitude for objects and actions. The model's fine-grained predictive performance is also found to be superior to other word-based models of representation (Latent Semantic Analysis, and similarity measures derived from Wordnet)

Grasp It Loudly! Supporting Actions with Semantically Congruent Spoken Action Words

Evidence for cross-talk between motor and language brain structures has accumulated over the past several years. However, while a significant amount of research has focused on the interaction between language perception and action, little attention has been paid to the potential impact of language production on overt motor behaviour

KISSING SLOWS LICKING: AN INVESTIGATION OF BODY PART OVERLAP IN VERB PRIMING

There is growing evidence that speakers mentally simulate the action portrayed by a verb and action simulation is an inherent part of language comprehension. This study examined if processing action words facilitates processing of other somatotopically (bodypart) related action words and if there are differences between normal and verb-impaired aphasic participants. Visual lexical priming of arm/hand and face/mouth verbs revealed that somatotopic relatedness interfered with processing of the ensuing verb in both groups and this interference effect was larger for aphasic participants. This suggests that semantic feature activation is robust and maybe an unlikely source of verb deficits in aphasia

The processing of actions and-action words in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis patients

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease with prime conse- quences on the motor function and concomitant cognitive changes, most frequently in the domain of executive functions. Moreover, poorer performance with action-verbs versus object-nouns has been reported in ALS patients, raising the hypothesis that the motor dysfunction deteriorates the semantic representation of actions. Using action-verbs and manipulable-object nouns sharing semantic relationship with the same motor represen- tations, the verb-noun difference was assessed in a group of 21 ALS-patients with severely impaired motor behavior, and compared with a normal sample's performance. ALS-group performed better on nouns than verbs, both in production (action and object naming) and comprehension (word-picture matching). This observation implies that the interpretation of the verb-noun difference in ALS cannot be accounted by the relatedness of verbs to motor representations, but has to consider the role of other semantic and/or morpho- phonological dimensions that distinctively define the two grammatical classes. More- over, this difference in the ALS-group was not greater than the noun-verb difference in the normal sample. The mental representation of actions also involves an executive-control component to organize, in logical/temporal order, the individual motor events (or sub- goals) that form a purposeful action. We assessed this ability with action sequencing tasks, requiring participants to re-construct a purposeful action from the scrambled pre- sentation of its constitutive motor events, shown in the form of photographs or short sentences. In those tasks, ALS-group's performance was significantly poorer than controls'. Thus, the executive dysfunction manifested in the sequencing deficit ebut not the selec- tive verb deficite appears as a consistent feature of the cognitive profile associated with LS. We suggest that ALS can offer a valuable model to study the relationship between (frontal) motor centers and the executive-control machinery housed in the frontal brain, and the implications of executive dysfunctions in tasks such as action processing

Conceptual Representations of Action in the Lateral Temporal Cortex

Retrieval of conceptual information from action pictures causes greater activation than from object pictures bilaterally in human motion areas (MT/MST) and nearby temporal regions. By contrast, retrieval of conceptual information from action words causes greater activation in left middle and superior temporal gyri, anterior and dorsal to the MT/MST. We performed two fMRI experiments to replicate and extend these findings regarding action words. In the first experiment, subjects performed conceptual judgments of action and object words under conditions that stressed visual semantic information. Under these conditions, action words again activated posterior temporal regions close to, but not identical with, the MT/MST. In the second experiment, we included conceptual judgments of manipulable object words in addition to judgments of action and animal words. Both action and manipulable object judgments caused greater activity than animal judgments in the posterior middle temporal gyrus. Both of these experiments support the hypothesis that middle temporal gyrus activation is related to accessing conceptual information about motion attributes, rather than alternative accounts on the basis of lexical or grammatical factors. Furthermore, these experiments provide additional support for the notion of a concrete to abstract gradient of motion representations with the lateral occipitotemporal cortex, extending anterior and dorsal from the MT/MST towards the peri-sylvian cortex

Brain correlates of action word memory revealed by fMRI

Understanding language semantically related to actions activates the motor cortex. This activation is sensitive to semantic information such as the body part used to perform the action (e.g. arm-/leg-related action words). Additionally, motor movements of the hands/feet can have a causal effect on memory maintenance of action words, suggesting that the involvement of motor systems extends to working memory. This study examined brain correlates of verbal memory load for action-related words using event-related fMRI. Seventeen participants saw either four identical or four different words from the same category (arm-/leg-related action words) then performed a nonmatching-to-sample task. Results show that verbal memory maintenance in the high-load condition produced greater activation in left premotor and supplementary motor cortex, along with posterior-parietal areas, indicating that verbal memory circuits for action-related words include the cortical action system. Somatotopic memory load effects of arm- and leg-related words were observed, but only at more anterior cortical regions than was found in earlier studies employing passive reading tasks. These findings support a neurocomputational model of distributed action-perception circuits (APCs), according to which language understanding is manifest as full ignition of APCs, whereas working memory is realized as reverberant activity receding to multimodal prefrontal and lateral temporal areas

Katniss as a Representation of Girl Power in Hunger Games Trilogy

This study is about the representation of girl power in Hunger Games trilogy.Hunger Games trilogy shows how women that are represented by the main character “Katniss”, can do what they want regardless others people opinion. It shows that Katniss as the main character lives in a society that does not have roles between man and woman by showing some action through her characterisctics in the story that against the culture and society. She is able to do anything without thinking about what man or woman should do. Thus,this thesis aims at showing girl power characteristics that are being represented by Katniss. Therefore, I will analyze girl power characteristics in Katniss by using girl power concept. Moreover through this analysis, I find that there are some girl power characteristics that are being represented by Katniss. First, she is an independent woman. Second, she is equally depends on her “brains and brawn”. Third, Katniss is a self-determined woman. For the result of the analysis, it can be concluded that Katniss is the representation of girl power that is shown through her action, words, and thoughts