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Interaction Between Words and Symbolic Gestures as Revealed By N400

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Abstract

What happens if you see a person pronouncing the word “go” after having gestured “stop”? Differently from iconic gestures, that must necessarily be accompanied by verbal language in order to be unambiguously understood, symbolic gestures are so conventionalized that they can be effortlessly understood in the absence of speech. Previous studies proposed that gesture and speech belong to a unique communication system. From an electrophysiological perspective the N400 modulation was considered the main variable indexing the interplay between two stimuli. However, while many studies tested this effect between iconic gestures and speech, little is known about the capability of an emblem to modulate the neural response to subsequently presented words. Using high-density EEG, the present study aimed at evaluating the presence of an N400 effect and its spatiotemporal dynamics, in terms of cortical activations, when emblems primed the observation of words. Participants were presented with symbolic gestures followed by a semantically congruent or incongruent verb. A N400 modulation was detected, showing larger negativity when gesture and words were incongruent. The source localization during N400 time window evidenced the activation of different portions of temporal cortex according to the gesture and word congruence. Our data provide further evidence of how the observation of an emblem influences verbal language perception, and of how this interplay is mainly instanced by different portions of the temporal cortex.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Riccardo Dalla Volta for the comments on the manuscript. The work was supported by MIUR (Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca) Grant to M.G. P.A. and C.C. were supported by the ERC Project n. 250013.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Brain Center for Social and Motor Cognition, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Via Volturno 39/E, 43100, Parma, Italy

    Maddalena Fabbri-Destro

  2. Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Università di Parma, Parma, Italy

    Pietro Avanzini, Elisa De Stefani, Alessandro Innocenti, Cristina Campi & Maurizio Gentilucci

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  1. Maddalena Fabbri-Destro
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  2. Pietro Avanzini
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  3. Elisa De Stefani
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  4. Alessandro Innocenti
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  5. Cristina Campi
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  6. Maurizio Gentilucci
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maddalena Fabbri-Destro.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material. Online Resource 1: The zip-file contains all the 20 videos used as stimuli. Each single videoclip is named with the corresponding gesture name listed in Table 1.

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Supplementary material 20 (AVI 7558 kb)

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Fabbri-Destro, M., Avanzini, P., De Stefani, E. et al. Interaction Between Words and Symbolic Gestures as Revealed By N400. Brain Topogr 28, 591–605 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-014-0392-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10548-014-0392-4

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