ABSTRACT Reading an action verb activates its corresponding motor representation in the reader’s motor cortex, but whether this activation is relevant for comprehension remains unclear. To quantify the contribution of motor representations to the conceptual processing of action verbs, we measured the efficiency of two participants with atypical motor experience due to congenitally severely reduced upper limbs in processing verbs referring to actions that they had previously executed (e.g., writing) or not (e.g., shoveling) and compared the efficiency difference between the two verb categories to that found in typical participants, who had previously executed all these actions. This allowed measuring the contribution of motor representations unbiased by confounded low-level, lexical and semantic variables. Although the task was sensitive and the participants’ performance was positively influenced by the richness of the words’ conceptual representations, we found no detectable advantage for words associated with motor representations.

中文翻译：

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有和没有运动表征的动作动词的概念处理

摘要 阅读一个动作动词会激活阅读者运动皮层中相应的运动表征，但这种激活是否与理解相关仍不清楚。为了量化运动表征对动作动词概念处理的贡献，我们测量了两名具有非典型运动经验的参与者的效率，因为先天性上肢严重萎缩，他们在处理涉及他们之前执行过的动作（例如，写作）或不（例如，铲）并将两个动词类别之间的效率差异与之前执行过所有这些动作的典型参与者的效率差异进行了比较。这允许测量运动表征的贡献，不受混淆的低级、词汇和语义变量的影响。