The sounds of meaning: Investigating the functional interaction between action sounds and semantics

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Friedemann Pulvermüller
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2016 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 316928999

Recent research has shown that cognitive-semantic memory access as well as phoneme processing are grounded in knowledge about actions and perceptions; however it remains under debate to what degree linguistic phonemic and semantic processes are influenced by, and functionally depend on, action and perception mechanisms. We will address these questions by investigating priming effects, manifest at the behavioural and neurophysiological levels, between the processing of action sounds and conceptual-linguistic information. The functional relationship (i) between the processing of action sounds and of words typically used to speak about actions, and (ii) between non-linguistic acoustic signals and phonemic speech sounds will be studied using EEG and, for better cortical localization, in epilepsy patients with subdural grid electrodes. In addition, we will use TMS in healthy people and study paraplegic and tetraplegic spinal cord injury patients to address possible causal effects of motor system functionality for processing non-linguistic action sounds and concrete action-related language. We expect that the results of these experiments will allow for an evaluation of current theories about grounded cognition that postulate a functional and causal role of sensory and motor mechanisms in conceptual and linguistic processing.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants