Abstract concepts and the activation of the mouth-hand effectors

Embodied and grounded approaches to cognition have compellingly demonstrated that we comprehend concrete words simulating their meaning through our sensorimotor system (Barsalou 2008). Abstract words, i.e., words that do not have a single and concrete referent, are more difficult to account for in a grounded perspective. According to the Words As social Tools (WAT) proposal (Borghi and Binkofski 2014), in the acquisition and representation of abstract words language plays a central role. Abstract words are indeed mainly acquired through linguistic-social experience (Wauters et al. 2003). We report a behavioral experiment showing that the elaboration of abstract words involves the mouth motor system, as embodied counterpart of the activation of linguistic information, and that the involvement of the mouth is flexibly modulated by the task.