Causal Influence of Articulatory Motor Cortex on Comprehending Single Spoken Words: TMS Evidence.

ABSTRACT: Classic wisdom had been that motor and premotor cortex contribute to motor execution but not to higher cognition and language comprehension. In contrast, mounting evidence from neuroimaging, patient research, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) suggest sensorimotor interaction and, specifically, that the articulatory motor cortex is important for classifying meaningless speech sounds into phonemic categories. However, whether these findings speak to the comprehension issue is unclear, because language comprehension does not require explicit phonemic classification and previous results may therefore relate to factors alien to semantic understanding. We here used the standard psycholinguistic test of spoken word comprehension, the word-to-picture-matching task, and concordant TMS to

SUBMITTER: Schomers MR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4585521 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature