Skip to main content
Passa alla visualizzazione normale.

MASSIMO GANGITANO

Verbal and pragmatic coding

Abstract

Planning reaching and grasping an object requires selective computation of extrinsic (i.e. distance) and intrinsic (i.e. size) object properties, respectively. However, the mechanism for this selection can be partially effective in this process, and nonrelevant object attributes can be used. An experiment was carried out to test whether linguistic information on object properties, as well as sensorial object information, could be automatically involved in movement planning. Subjects were required to reach and grasp a wooden bar, that could have two sizes and could be placed at two spatial positions. An Italian word, either lungo (long) or corto (short) was written on the external face of the object. No analysis of the word was required to the subjects. Results showed that arm velocity was higher for farther object position. In addition, the word influenced arm velocity. Faster reaching movements were found for stimuli with the word lungo with respect to stimuli with the word corto. In other words, the subjects planned a movement as if the stimuli with the word lungo were positioned farther than the stimuli with the word corto. This finding indicates that high-level coding are automatically involved in the analysis of object attributes, as distance. We conclude that in human behaviour the verbal representation is may be related to pragmatic object representation. This may support the notion of the correspondence between praxic and linguistic functions, shown by neuropsychological studies.