Title :

“Embodied” language processing: Mental motor imagery aptitude predicts word-definition skill for high but not for low imageable words in adolescents

Author(s) :

Cayol, Zoé [Auteur]
Institut des Sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod - Laboratoire sur le langage, le cerveau et la cognition [L2C2]
Rotival, Coralie [Auteur]
Institut des Sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod - Laboratoire sur le langage, le cerveau et la cognition [L2C2]
Paulignan, Yves [Auteur]
Institut des Sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod - Laboratoire sur le langage, le cerveau et la cognition [L2C2]
Nazir, Tatjana [Auteur]
Laboratoire Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives - UMR 9193 [SCALab]

Journal title :

Brain and Cognition

Abbreviated title :

Brain and Cognition

Volume number :

145

Pages :

105628

Publication date :

2020-09-30

ISSN :

02782626

English keyword(s) :

Embodied cognition
Motor imagery
Language
Word imageability
Motor action
Emulators

English abstract : [en]

Our study was designed to test a recent proposal by Cayol and Nazir (2020), according to which language processing takes advantage of motor system “emulators”. An emulator is a brain mechanism that learns the causal ...
Show more >Our study was designed to test a recent proposal by Cayol and Nazir (2020), according to which language processing takes advantage of motor system “emulators”. An emulator is a brain mechanism that learns the causal relationship between an action and its sensory consequences. Emulators predict the outcome of a motor command in terms of its sensory reafference and serve monitoring ongoing movements. For the purpose of motor planning/learning, emulators can “run offline”, decoupled from sensory input and motor output. Such offline simulations are equivalent to mental imagery (Grush, 2004). If language processing can profit from the associative-memory network of emulators, mental-imagery-aptitude should predict language skills. However, this should hold only for language content that is imageable. We tested this assumption in typically developing adolescents using two motor-imagery paradigms. One that measured participant’s error in estimating their motor ability, and another that measured the time to perform a mental simulation. When the time to perform a mental simulation is taken as measure, mental-imagery-aptitude does indeed selectively predict word-definition performance for high imageable words. These results provide an alternative position relative to the question of why language processes recruit modality-specific brain regions and support the often-hypothesized link between language and motor skills.Show less >

Language :

Anglais

Audience :

Internationale

Popular science :

Non

Related reference(s) :

https://www-sciencedirect-com.ressources-electroniques.univ-lille.fr/science/article/am/pii/S0278262620302311?redirect=no

Administrative institution(s) :

CNRS
Université de Lille
CHU Lille

Collections :

• Sciences Cognitives et Sciences Affectives (SCALab) - UMR 9193

Research team(s) :

Équipe Action, Vision et Apprentissage (AVA)

Submission date :

2021-12-08T09:51:24Z
2022-01-04T13:04:27Z