April 25 – Stephen Wilson: “Neural evidence for the role of sensorimotor systems in linguistic representations”

There are at least two major ways in which linguistic representations can be "embodied". Firstly, since speech is produced by movement of the articulators, phonetic representations are by necessity embodied, at least for the purposes of production. An interesting question however is whether phonetic or phonological representations involved in perception or central processes are also organized in an analogous body-based manner. Secondly, the representation of semantic concepts may relate (in part) to body schemas. This could involve both nouns (e.g. 'hand') and verbs (e.g. 'grasp'), and may extend metaphorically into abstract domains (e.g. 'hold onto that thought'). I will discuss recent studies using functional neuroimaging and other techniques which have investigated the role of sensorimotor systems in both of these kinds of linguistic representations: phonological and semantic.