Neuromagnetic hand and foot motor sources recruited during action verb processing

• MEG dipoles from actual movements explain brain activity during verb processing.
• Hand and foot dipoles differentially respond to hand and foot verbs.
• Motor source activation occurs in the absence of any motor task.
• Results are in line with the hypotheses of embodied cognition.

The current study investigated sensorimotor involvement in the processing of verbs describing actions performed with the hands, feet, or no body part. Actual movements were used to identify neuromagnetic sources for hand and foot actions. These sources constrained the analysis of verb processing. While hand and foot sources picked up activation in all three verb conditions, peak amplitudes showed an interaction of source and verb condition at 200 ms after word onset, thereby reflecting effector-specificity. Specifically, hand verbs elicited significantly higher peak amplitudes than foot verbs in hand sources. Our results are in line with theories of embodied cognition that assume an involvement of sensorimotor areas in early stages of lexico-semantic processing, even for single words without a semantic or motor task.