Our study was designed to test a recent proposal by Cayol and Nazir (2020), according to which language processing takes advantage of motor system “emulators”. An emulator is a brain mechanism that learns the causal relationship between an action and its sensory consequences. Emulators predict the outcome of a motor command in terms of its sensory reafference and serve monitoring ongoing movements. For the purpose of motor planning/learning, emulators can “run offline”, decoupled from sensory input and motor output. Such offline simulations are equivalent to mental imagery (Grush, 2004). If language processing can profit from the associative-memory network of emulators, mental-imagery-aptitude should predict language skills. However, this should hold only for language content that is imageable. We tested this assumption in typically developing adolescents using two motor-imagery paradigms. One that measured participant’s error in estimating their motor ability, and another that measured the time to perform a mental simulation. When the time to perform a mental simulation is taken as measure, mental-imagery-aptitude does indeed selectively predict word-definition performance for high imageable words. These results provide an alternative position relative to the question of why language processes recruit modality-specific brain regions and support the often-hypothesized link between language and motor skills.

我们的研究旨在测试Cayol和Nazir（2020）的最新建议，根据该建议，语言处理利用了电机系统“仿真器”的优势。模拟器是一种大脑机制，可以学习动作与其感官后果之间的因果关系。仿真器可以根据运动感觉来预测运动命令的结果，并监视正在进行的运动。出于电机规划/学习的目的，仿真器可以“离线运行”，与感觉输入和电机输出分离。这种离线模拟等同于心理意象（Grush，2004）。如果语言处理可以从仿真器的关联内存网络中获利，则心理意象应该可以预测语言技能。但是，这仅适用于可成像的语言内容。我们使用两种运动图像范例在典型的发育中的青少年中测试了这一假设。一个用来衡量参与者在估计他们的运动能力时的错误，另一个用来衡量进行心理模拟的时间。当以进行心理模拟的时间作为衡量标准时，mental-imagery-aptitude确实确实选择性地预测了高可成像单词的单词定义性能。这些结果相对于为什么语言过程会招募特定于情态的大脑区域并支持语言与运动技能之间经常被假设为假想的联系的问题提供了另一种立场。当以进行心理模拟的时间作为衡量标准时，mental-imagery-aptitude确实确实选择性地预测了高可成像单词的单词定义性能。这些结果相对于为什么语言过程会招募特定于情态的大脑区域并支持语言与运动技能之间经常被假设为假想的联系的问题提供了另一种立场。当以进行心理模拟的时间作为衡量标准时，mental-imagery-aptitude确实确实选择性地预测了高可成像单词的单词定义性能。这些结果相对于为什么语言过程会招募特定于情态的大脑区域并支持语言与运动技能之间经常被假设为假想的联系的问题提供了另一种立场。