Embodied cognition theories predict a functional involvement of sensorimotor processes in language understanding. In a preregistered experiment, we tested this idea by investigating whether interfering with primary motor cortex (M1) activation can change how people construe meaning from action language. Participants were presented with sentences describing actions (e.g., "turning off the light”) and asked to choose between two interpretations of their meaning, one more concrete (e.g., "flipping a switch") and another more abstract (e.g., "going to sleep"). Prior to this task, participants’ M1 was disrupted using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). The results yielded strong evidence against the idea that M1-rTMS affects meaning construction (BF > 30). Additional analyses and control experiments suggest that the absence of effect cannot be accounted for by failure to inhibit M1, lack of construct validity of the task, or lack of power to detect a small effect. In sum, these results do not support a causal role for primary motor cortex in building meaning from action language.

中文翻译：

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不支持初级运动皮层在解释语言意义中的因果作用：一项 rTMS 研究

具身认知理论预测感觉运动过程在语言理解中的功能参与。在一项预先注册的实验中，我们通过调查干扰初级运动皮层 (M1) 激活是否可以改变人们从动作语言中理解含义的方式来测试这个想法。参与者被呈现描述动作的句子（例如，“关掉灯”），并被要求在其含义的两种解释之间进行选择，一种更具体（例如，“扳动开关”），另一种更抽象（例如，“去睡眠”）。在这项任务之前，使用重复经颅磁刺激（rTMS）扰乱参与者的 M1。结果提供了强有力的证据，反对 M1-rTMS 影响意义构建（BF > 30）的观点。额外的分析和对照实验表明效果的缺失不能用未能抑制 M1、缺乏任务的结构有效性或缺乏检测小效果的能力来解释。总之，这些结果不支持初级运动皮层在构建过程中的因果作用来自行动语言的意义。