Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Department of Neuropsychology, Leipzig, Germany; International Max Planck Research School on Neuroscience of Communication: Function, Structure, and Plasticity, Leipzig, Germany.
Department of Philosophy and Communication, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy.
Brain Res. 2021 Sep 15;1767:147523. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2021.147523. Epub 2021 May 16.
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.
根据具身认知的观点，语言中的否定可能会阻碍语言处理所引发的运动模拟。本研究使用经颅磁刺激（TMS）对单语意大利语和德语健康参与者的左初级运动皮层（手部区域）进行刺激，同时快速呈现来自他们自己语言的句子。在这两种语言中，否定词分别位于句子的开头和结尾。该研究旨在探讨在否定词位置不同的两种语言中，运动模拟过程是否会因运动诱发电位（MEP）的减少而中断。此外，还操纵了句子的不同具体程度，以调查否定是否会产生普遍影响，或者是否会受到句子的语义特征的影响。我们的研究结果表明，否定会对运动表象产生阻碍作用，但与语言和词汇的具体程度无关。
