@article{Understanding:1898,
      recid = {1898},
      author = {Gijssels, Tom},
      title = {Action Language Understanding Reflects Bodily and Social  Experience},
      publisher = {The University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2019-06},
      pages = {105},
      abstract = {People construct the meaning of words by relying, in part,  on neural systems for perception and action. For instance,  when people process language about actions, they show  body-part specific activation in premotor circuits used for  preparing actions. How does premotor cortex contribute to  the meaning of action language? In Study 1, I used fMRI to  test whether people rely on different kinds of action  experience to understand language about their own actions  and other people’s actions. When left- and right-handers  imagined their own unimanual actions, they preferentially  activated premotor circuits controlling their dominant  hand. By contrast, when imagining other people’s actions,  premotor activity also reflected how participants typically  see others perform those actions. Language-induced imagery  for our own actions reflects how we use our own bodies,  whereas imagery for others’ actions also reflects how  others use their bodies. In Study 2, I show that premotor  cortex functionally contributes to how well people process  action language. tDCS to premotor hand-areas selectively  affected how accurately people processed unimanual action  verbs (but not abstract verbs): Inhibitory stimulation  caused a relative improvement in how people processed  manual action verbs, whereas excitatory stimulation caused  a relative impairment. In Study 3, I developed corpora of  Dutch and English manual action verbs to quantify how  people use their hands to perform the actions described by  these verbs, and show how these corpora provide a  precision-tool to test whether the way in which people  simulate a given action verb reflects how they typically  use their body to perform that action.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1898},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1898},
}