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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on December 9, 2008
Cerebral Cortex 2009 19(8):1905-1914; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhn217
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Published by Oxford University Press 2008.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Grasping Ideas with the Motor System: Semantic Somatotopy in Idiom Comprehension

Véronique Boulenger, Olaf Hauk and Friedemann Pulvermüller

Medical Research Council, Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge CB2 7EF, UK

Address correspondence to Véronique Boulenger, PhD, Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage—UMR CNRS 5596, Institut des Sciences de l'Homme, 14 avenue Berthelot, 69363 Lyon Cedex 07, France. Email: Veronique.Boulenger{at}ish-lyon.cnrs.fr.

Single words and sentences referring to bodily actions activate the motor cortex. However, this semantic grounding of concrete language does not address the critical question whether the sensory–motor system contributes to the processing of abstract meaning and thought. We examined functional magnetic resonance imaging activation to idioms and literal sentences including arm- and leg-related action words. A common left fronto-temporal network was engaged in sentence reading, with idioms yielding relatively stronger activity in (pre)frontal and middle temporal cortex. Crucially, somatotopic activation along the motor strip, in central and precentral cortex, was elicited by idiomatic and literal sentences, reflecting the body part reference of the words embedded in the sentences. Semantic somatotopy was most pronounced after sentence ending, thus reflecting sentence-level processing rather than that of single words. These results indicate that semantic representations grounded in the sensory–motor system play a role in the composition of sentence-level meaning, even in the case of idioms.

Key Words: action words • fMRI • idioms • motor cortex • semantic somatotopy


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