Body part representations in verbal semantics.

Embodied theories of language propose that word meaning is inextricably tied to-grounded in-mental representations of perceptual, motor, and affective experiences of the world. The four experiments described in this article demonstrate that accessing the meanings of action verbs like smile, punch, and kick requires language understanders to activate modality-specific cognitive representations responsible for performing and perceiving those same actions. The main task used is a word-image matching task, where participants see an action verb and an image depicting an action.