Rueschemeyer, S.
University of York, UK
Language is a universal, pervasive and powerful tool for human social interaction. Therefore, a full-fledged understanding of the social brain must address the question of how language transports meaning between interlocutors. Recent studies have argued that understanding words results in activation of neural pathways involved in real-world experience with words’ referents; thereby transforming abstract symbols (i.e., words) into concrete information (e.g., perceptual/action experience). However, as I will demonstrate in this talk, word comprehension activates perceptual and motor areas in a flexible and dynamic manner, which reflects the overall propositional content of an utterance, rather than the meaning of individual lexical items. The flexibility with which neural motor areas are activated by language is intuitive when thinking about language as a flexible and communicative system; however it opens questions about whether embodiment really reflects anything about the architecture of the mental lexicon.