When syntax meets action: Brain potential evidence of overlapping between language and motor sequencing

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psycholinguistics
• Embodied Cognition

Background:

• Embodied cognition theory posits that language understanding relies on sensorimotor systems.
• Previous research suggests motor system involvement in language processing, but direct evidence for syntactic processing is limited.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether the brain resources for motor sequencing are shared with syntactic processing.
• To test if the method of sentence self-administration influences syntactic processing.

Main Methods:

• Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read sentences with embedded relative clauses.
• Sentences were self-administered segment-by-segment in either a linear (consecutive fingers) or non-linear (finger and foot) motor sequence.
• Participants judged sentence acceptability, with some containing morphosyntactic errors.

Main Results:

• The early syntactic processing component (LAN) diminished under non-linear compared to linear motor sequencing.
• The late syntactic processing component (P600) increased under non-linear compared to linear motor sequencing for incorrect verbs.
• These ERP changes suggest that motor sequence complexity impacts syntactic processing.

Conclusions:

• Language syntactic processing and non-linguistic motor sequence planning likely share neural resources.
• The findings support the embodied cognition approach by demonstrating the interplay between motor control and language comprehension.