Turning Our Words into Actions.

Linguists have been trying to map language (and all it's cognitive aspects) in the brain. We now know (generally) where speech is produced, where grammar comes into the picture, where written language is decoded, etc.

Recently, linguists have been looking for meaning in the brain. For example, you just heard the word 'cat', but is your concept of 'cat' stored in the same place as your perception of someone saying the word 'cat'? The short answer is 'no'. Most studies of this nature (trying to localize word meaning in the brain) have focused on concrete, visual nouns. In a study by Hauk, Johnsrude, and Pavermuller (2004), the question of word localization is applied to action words with very interesting results.

Their experiment was elegant. They chose three categories of action words, each related to a different region of the body (specifically face/tongue words like "lick", arm words, "throw", and leg words, "kick"). They selected 50 words for each category and then had their subjects read them (silently), all while in an fMRI brain scanning machine. Turns out that the (non-language-specific) areas of the brain that are activated by DOING the physical action (of the word) overlap significantly with the brain areas activated be just READING the word. Let me run that by you again. Reading an action word like "throw" activates the arm-related area of the motor cortex as well as normal language areas.

Now, no experiment should be taken too seriously, but this data implies that the meaning of a word (at least the meaning of an action word) lies somewhere between understanding the word and doing the action.