UCLA Brain Mapping Center

Publications

No language-specific activation during linguistic processing of observed actions.

Meister IG; Iacoboni M;
PloS one. 2007-Dec; 2(e891):9
 
It has been suggested that cortical neural systems for language evolved from motor cortical systems, in particular from those fronto-parietal systems responding also to action observation. While previous studies have shown shared cortical systems for action--or action observation--and language, they did not address the question of whether linguistic processing of visual stimuli occurs only within a subset of fronto-parietal areas responding to action observation. If this is true, the hypothesis that language evolved from fronto-parietal systems matching action execution and action observation would be strongly reinforced.
 
PMID: 17849020    doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0000891
 

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