Dataset Information

Grip force reveals the context sensitivity of language-induced motor activity during "action words" processing: evidence from sentential negation.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Studies demonstrating the involvement of motor brain structures in language processing typically focus on time windows beyond the latencies of lexical-semantic access. Consequently, such studies remain inconclusive regarding whether motor brain structures are recruited directly in language processing or through post-linguistic conceptual imagery. In the present study, we introduce a grip-force sensor that allows online measurements of language-induced motor activity during sentence listening. We use this tool to investigate whether language-induced motor activity remains constant or is modulated in negative, as opposed to affirmative, linguistic contexts.

Methodology/principal findings

Participants listened to spoken action target words in either affirmative or negative sentences while holding a sensor in a precision grip. The participants were asked to count the sentences containing the name of a country to ensure attention. The grip force signal was recorded continuously. The action words elicited an automatic and significant enhancement of the grip force starting at approximately 300 ms after target word onset in affirmative sentences; however, no comparable grip force modulation was observed when these action words occurred in negative contexts.

Conclusions/significance

Our findings demonstrate that this simple experimental paradigm can be used to study the online crosstalk between language and the motor systems in an ecological and economical manner. Our data further confirm that the motor brain structures that can be called upon during action word processing are not mandatorily involved; the crosstalk is asymmetrically governed by the linguistic context and not vice versa.

SUBMITTER: Aravena P

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3515598 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Grip force reveals the context sensitivity of language-induced motor activity during "action words" processing: evidence from sentential negation.

Aravena Pia P Delevoye-Turrell Yvonne Y Deprez Viviane V Cheylus Anne A Paulignan Yves Y Frak Victor V Nazir Tatjana T

PloS one 20121205 12

<h4>Background</h4>Studies demonstrating the involvement of motor brain structures in language processing typically focus on time windows beyond the latencies of lexical-semantic access. Consequently, such studies remain inconclusive regarding whether motor brain structures are recruited directly in language processing or through post-linguistic conceptual imagery. In the present study, we introduce a grip-force sensor that allows online measurements of language-induced motor activity during sen ...[more]

PMID: 23227164

Similar Datasets

Project description:Neuroimaging and neuropsychological experiments suggest that modality-preferential cortices, including motor- and somatosensory areas, contribute to the semantic processing of action related concrete words. Still, a possible role of sensorimotor areas in processing abstract meaning remains under debate. Recent fMRI studies indicate an involvement of the left sensorimotor cortex in the processing of abstract-emotional words (e.g., "love") which resembles activation patterns seen for action words. But are the activated areas indeed necessary for processing action-related and abstract words? The current study now investigates word processing in two patients suffering from focal brain lesion in the left frontocentral motor system. A speeded Lexical Decision Task on meticulously matched word groups showed that the recognition of nouns from different semantic categories - related to food, animals, tools, and abstract-emotional concepts - was differentially affected. Whereas patient HS with a lesion in dorsolateral central sensorimotor systems next to the hand area showed a category-specific deficit in recognizing tool words, patient CA suffering from lesion centered in the left supplementary motor area was primarily impaired in abstract-emotional word processing. These results point to a causal role of the motor cortex in the semantic processing of both action-related object concepts and abstract-emotional concepts and therefore suggest that the motor areas previously found active in action-related and abstract word processing can serve a meaning-specific necessary role in word recognition. The category-specific nature of the observed dissociations is difficult to reconcile with the idea that sensorimotor systems are somehow peripheral or 'epiphenomenal' to meaning and concept processing. Rather, our results are consistent with the claim that cognition is grounded in action and perception and based on distributed action perception circuits reaching into modality-preferential cortex.

Project description:BackgroundImportant clinical information of patients is present in unstructured free-text fields of Electronic Health Records (EHRs). While this information can be extracted using clinical Natural Language Processing (cNLP), the recognition of negation modifiers represents an important challenge. A wide range of cNLP applications have been developed to detect the negation of medical entities in clinical free-text, however, effective solutions for languages other than English are scarce. This study aimed at developing a solution for negation recognition in Spanish EHRs based on a combination of a customized rule-based NegEx layer and a convolutional neural network (CNN).MethodsBased on our previous experience in real world evidence (RWE) studies using information embedded in EHRs, negation recognition was simplified into a binary problem ('affirmative' vs. 'non-affirmative' class). For the NegEx layer, negation rules were obtained from a publicly available Spanish corpus and enriched with custom ones, whereby the CNN binary classifier was trained on EHRs annotated for clinical named entities (cNEs) and negation markers by medical doctors.ResultsThe proposed negation recognition pipeline obtained precision, recall, and F1-score of 0.93, 0.94, and 0.94 for the 'affirmative' class, and 0.86, 0.84, and 0.85 for the 'non-affirmative' class, respectively. To validate the generalization capabilities of our methodology, we applied the negation recognition pipeline on EHRs (6,710 cNEs) from a different data source distribution than the training corpus and obtained consistent performance metrics for the 'affirmative' and 'non-affirmative' class (0.95, 0.97, and 0.96; and 0.90, 0.83, and 0.86 for precision, recall, and F1-score, respectively). Lastly, we evaluated the pipeline against two publicly available Spanish negation corpora, the IULA and NUBes, obtaining state-of-the-art metrics (1.00, 0.99, and 0.99; and 1.00, 0.93, and 0.96 for precision, recall, and F1-score, respectively).ConclusionNegation recognition is a source of low precision in the retrieval of cNEs from EHRs' free-text. Combining a customized rule-based NegEx layer with a CNN binary classifier outperformed many other current approaches. RWE studies highly benefit from the correct recognition of negation as it reduces false positive detections of cNE which otherwise would undoubtedly reduce the credibility of cNLP systems.

Dataset Information

Grip force reveals the context sensitivity of language-induced motor activity during "action words" processing: evidence from sentential negation.

Background

Methodology/principal findings

Conclusions/significance

Publications

Grip force reveals the context sensitivity of language-induced motor activity during "action words" processing: evidence from sentential negation.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets