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Abstract
Since the early days of research into language and the brain, word meaning was assumed
to be processed in specific brain regions, which most modern neuroscientists localize
to the left temporal lobe. Here we use event-related fMRI to show that action words
referring to face, arm, or leg actions (e.g., to lick, pick, or kick), when presented
in a passive reading task, differentially activated areas along the motor strip that
either were directly adjacent to or overlapped with areas activated by actual movement
of the tongue, fingers, or feet. These results demonstrate that the referential meaning
of action words has a correlate in the somatotopic activation of motor and premotor
cortex. This rules out a unified "meaning center" in the human brain and supports
a dynamic view according to which words are processed by distributed neuronal assemblies
with cortical topographies that reflect word semantics.