Action and abstraction: Motor interference changes meaning in language understanding

Abstract

Can the body shape meaning? Eight experiments (four preregistered) tested whether interfering with the motor system changes how people interpret language about actions. Participants (total N = 880) rhythmically moved their hands or feet while being presented with sentences describing hand or foot actions (e.g., “scoring a goal in soccer”) and asked to choose between two interpretations of their meaning: one more concrete (e.g., ”kicking a ball“) and another more abstract (e.g., ”winning a match“). Despite not all experiments showed significant results, the overall pattern revealed effector-specific effects of motor interference on meaning construction, which were further modulated by the amount of delay between the sentences and their interpretations. When the delay was short (200 ms), participants chose more concrete interpretations for described actions that involved the same effector being moved. In contrast, when the delay was long (15 s), participants who moved their feet chose more abstract interpretations for foot-related sentences. Although preliminary, these results provide the first evidence that motor action can cause qualitative changes in sentence understanding, consistent with the functional role of the motor system in lexical semantics suggested by embodiment theories.