Research report 2009 - Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
How the body shapes language and imagination in the brain
Authors
Casasanto, Daniel
Departments
Sprachproduktion (Prof. Dr. Peter Hagoort)
MPI für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen
Summary
If the content of our minds depends in part on the structure of our bodies, then people with different body types should think differently. To test this proposal, scientists at the MPI for Psycholinguistics used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine the neural correlates of language comprehension and motor imagery cued by verbs that name actions people tend to perform with their dominant hand (write, throw). Action verb understanding and action imagery were differently lateralized in right- and left-handers’ brains, consistent with the way they perform the actions with their particular bodies.