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How the motor system handles nouns: a behavioral study

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Abstract

It is an open question whether the motor system is involved during understanding of concrete nouns, as it is for concrete verbs. To clarify this issue, we carried out a behavioral experiment using a go-no go paradigm with an early and delayed go-signal delivery. Italian nouns referring to concrete objects (hand-related or foot-related) and abstract entities served as stimuli. Right-handed participants read the stimuli and responded when the presented word was concrete using the left or right hand. At the early go-signal, slower right-hand responses were found for hand-related nouns compared to foot-related nouns. The opposite pattern was found for the left hand. These findings demonstrate an early lateralized modulation of the motor system during noun processing, most likely crucial for noun comprehension.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the European Community Grant ICT-216125-ROSSI and by MIUR (Ministero Italiano dell’Università e della Ricerca).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Sezione di Fisiologia, Università di Parma, 39 Via Volturno, 43100, Parma, Italy

    Barbara F. M. Marino, Patricia M. Gough, Vittorio Gallese & Lucia Riggio

  2. IIT Brain Center for Social and Motor Cognition, 39 Via Volturno, 43100, Parma, Italy

    Vittorio Gallese

  3. Dipartimento di Scienze Mediche, Università “Magna Graecia” di Catanzaro, Viale Salvatore Venuta, 88100, Germaneto, CZ, Italy

    Giovanni Buccino

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  1. Barbara F. M. Marino
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  2. Patricia M. Gough
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  3. Vittorio Gallese
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  4. Lucia Riggio
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  5. Giovanni Buccino
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Correspondence to Giovanni Buccino.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 1.

Table 1 Linguistic material used in Experiment 1. For each noun, category, number of letters, number of syllable and relative lexical frequency (number of occurrence per million—Laudanna et al., 1995) are listed
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Marino, B.F.M., Gough, P.M., Gallese, V. et al. How the motor system handles nouns: a behavioral study. Psychological Research 77, 64–73 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-011-0371-2

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