To Move or Not to Move: Imperatives Modulate Action-related Verb Processing in the Motor System.

FORMAL REFERENCE:
Tomasino, B., P.H. Weiss, and G.R. Fink. 2010. "To Move or Not to Move: Imperatives Modulate Action-related Verb Processing in the Motor System." Neuroscience 169, no. 1: 246-258. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed March 17, 2011).

RELEVANT SECTIONS:
Entire article

SUMMARY:

This is a highly scientific and academic article with plenty of jargon. It is concerned with brain activation in response to imperative verbs/action words. While the topic is not directly related to exclamation marks, I believe it to be applicable.

Imperative statements are often followed by exclamation marks, and they are some of the most simple statements in the English language. This study confirmed previous studies in noting that imperative statements activated certain structures of the brain, and that the structures activated actually had a relation to the action in the imperative statement. For example, saying “Do grasp” would activate the portion of the mind related to actually grasping.

“Therefore, we think that the highly consistent modulation of motor system activity by linguistic context, in which action verbs are presented, is a specific effect of action verb processing on the corresponding sensorimotor representations.”

Also, nonsense words very similar to real action words lit up the structures related to the real words: “Gralp” vs “grasp” lit up “grap.” This shows that we process language in part based on expectations.

ASSESSMENT:

This is a highly credibly article published in the widely-read scholarly journal Neuroscience. We can therefore imply that the authors are vetted, and they are: they are researchers at the Institute of Neuroscience an Medicine in Juelich, Germany and the Department of Neurology at University Hospital in Cologne, Germany.

We can validate the study by recognizing that the research was modeled after previous fMRI and language-processing studies which garnered similar results. Furthermore, the research is very recent (2010) and the literature review is absolutely huge.

REFLECTION:

Though the topic is not directly related to exclamation marks, it establishes that language is processed systematically in the brain within contexts. This will be important in arguing that research on the perception of exclamation marks will likely garner solid, systematic and context-related results rather than no results at all—that there is something to actually be investigated here, especially related to action words/imperatives.

It will also be useful in deciding a questionnaire/data-collection format, as it indicates that phrasing may elicit different responses: for example, “Do walk!” would likely take less time for the reader to process than “Don’t walk!” and may even be perceived in a different context.

It would also be of note to mention that this same FMRI approach could be used to someday measure the results of my study.

KEYWORDS AND LABELS:

embodied cognition, imperatives, action words, language processing