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Electronic Letters to:
- BehavioralSystemsCognitive:
Marina Bedny, Alfonso Caramazza, Emily Grossman, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, and Rebecca Saxe- Concepts Are More than Percepts: The Case of Action Verbs
J. Neurosci. 2008; 28: 11347-11353[Abstract] [Full text] [PDF]
eLetters: Submit a response to this article
Electronic letters published:
There is more to action words than verbs: The case of action nouns
- Ana Maria Abreu, Matteo Candidi (3 March 2009)
There is more to action words than verbs: The case of action nouns 3 March 2009 
Ana Maria Abreu,
Postdoctoral fellow
I.C.S. - U.C.P. Edifício da Biblioteca João Paulo II 5º. Palma de Cima, 1649-023 Lisboa, Portugal.,
Matteo CandidiSend letter to journal:
Re: There is more to action words than verbs: The case of action nouns
anamariablom{at}gmail.com Ana Maria Abreu, et al.
Bedny et al. (2008) propose that concepts are represented outside the sensory-motor cortices and are organized in keeping with their grammatical properties. The authors suggest that PLTC activity during action verb judgments might reflect retrieval of event concepts and that sensory features do not form the substrate of conceptual representation for word comprehension. One of the main findings obtained in Bedny et al.’s study to support the idea that there is no reactivation of the sensory motor cortices, was the non-overlap of PLTC and visual motion regions. The authors propose that the brain separately represents the grammatical class of words (verbs and nouns), and that the PLTC is associated with the representation of verbs. However, to say this, one should demonstrate that the only feature of a word that modulates the activity of PLTC is its grammatical class and not its meaning (i.e. content). We propose a different choice of nouns to overcome this. Verbs and nouns are differentiated by their semantic purpose. But if the amount of visual- motion information is to be controlled and matched in these two distinct grammatical types, one should concentrate on the content and not the purpose. Thus, instead of comparing a verb such as “to run” with a noun such as “the cat”, we suggest comparing verbs with their derivate nouns. An example would be to compare “to run” (i.e. a high-motion verb) with “runner” (i.e. a high-motion noun). Alternatively, “to think”, a mental verb, should be paired with “thinker”, a derivate mental noun. Such pairing would probably lead to the control of content (i.e. motion quantity) allowing the controlled assessment of the surviving variable (i.e. grammatical class).
The case presented by Bedny et al. (2008) charters new ground and answers very pertinent questions concerning the different views on grounding cognition. It sheds new light and provides new insights concerning the way concepts are organized and retrieved. We hope that our suggestion might contribute to the better understanding of this theme.
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