Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Motor cortex has been found to play a crucial role in processing the semantics of spoken and written action-relatedlanguage as well as in early speech perception. One possibility is that the motor system is always involved in perception andcognition, picking up any available motor information in the environment. If this is true we should see increased corticospinalexcitability when subjects are looking at anything that affords motor behaviors or possible simulation of motor behaviors. Weused Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and electromyography to investigate corticospinal excitability while participants readhandwritten or typed words and non-words from a computer screen. Results show that for typed words, there is an increase inexcitability for words compared to non-words, while the reverse is true for handwritten words. We discuss implications for thepossible role of the motor system in early language perception in different contexts.