Grounding Sentence Processing in the Sensory-Motor System

A decade of evidence in favor of or against the involvement of the primary motor and premotor cortices in conceptual-semantic sentence processing has generated an animated debate among scholars on the necessary versus epiphenomenal nature of such an involvement. As both the strong embodied and the strictly disembodied theoretical positions increasingly lose explanatory power, an open experimental question that becomes highly relevant is how to clarify the flexible sentential linguistic context under which this involvement occurs and whether the grounding in the motor system can be beneficial to language processing. The emerging generalized grounded cognition framework of conceptual-semantic sentence processing emphasizes the functional role of distributed sensory-motor and experiential neurocognitive systems that are differentially involved, depending on the specific semantic features and meanings of the concepts' referents and depending on the lexical and grammatical sentential format used to express them linguistically.