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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on December 11, 2006
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhl141
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

When Language Meets Action: The Neural Integration of Gesture and Speech

Roel M. Willems1, Asli Özyürek1,2 and Peter Hagoort1,3

1 F. C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University Nijmegen, PO Box 9101, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 2 Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 3 Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information, Radboud University Nijmegen, PO Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Address correspondence to F. C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University Nijmegen, PO Box 9101, 6500 HB Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Email: roel.willems{at}fcdonders.ru.nl.

Although generally studied in isolation, language and action often co-occur in everyday life. Here we investigated one particular form of simultaneous language and action, namely speech and gestures that speakers use in everyday communication. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we identified the neural networks involved in the integration of semantic information from speech and gestures. Verbal and/or gestural content could be integrated easily or less easily with the content of the preceding part of speech. Premotor areas involved in action observation (Brodmann area [BA] 6) were found to be specifically modulated by action information "mismatching" to a language context. Importantly, an increase in integration load of both verbal and gestural information into prior speech context activated Broca's area and adjacent cortex (BA 45/47). A classical language area, Broca's area, is not only recruited for language-internal processing but also when action observation is integrated with speech. These findings provide direct evidence that action and language processing share a high-level neural integration system.

Key Words: Broca's area • fMRI • gestures • inferior frontal cortex • semantic processing


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