Embodied negation and levels of concreteness: A TMS Study on German and Italian language processing

TL;DR

This study used TMS to investigate how negation affects motor simulation during language processing in German and Italian, finding that negation blocks motor representations regardless of language or sentence concreteness.

Contribution

It demonstrates that negation universally blocks motor simulation in language processing, independent of language-specific negation placement or sentence concreteness.

Findings

Negation reduces motor evoked potentials during language comprehension.

The blocking effect of negation is consistent across German and Italian.

Negation's effect is independent of sentence concreteness levels.

Abstract

According to the embodied cognition perspective, linguistic negation may block the motor simulations induced by language processing. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was applied to the left primary motor cortex (hand area) of monolingual Italian and German healthy participants during a rapid serial visual presentation of sentences from their own language. In these languages, the negative particle is located at the beginning and at the end of the sentence, respectively. The study investigated whether the interruption of the motor simulation processes, accounted for by reduced motor evoked potentials (MEPs), takes place similarly in two languages differing on the position of the negative marker. Different levels of sentence concreteness were also manipulated to investigate if negation exerts generalized effects or if it is affected by the semantic features of the sentence. Our findings indicate that negation acts as a block on motor representations, but independently from the language and words concreteness level.