Kinesthetic motor-imagery training improves performance on lexical-semantic access
(2022) PLOS ONE — Vol. 17, n° 6, p. e0270352 (2022)
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- Authors
Bayram, Mariam 
El Bouzaïdi Tiali, Samuel Perrone-Bertolotti, Marcela
- Abstract
- The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of Motor Imagery (MI) training on lan- guage comprehension. In line with literature suggesting an intimate relationship between the language and the motor system, we proposed that a MI-training could improve language comprehension by facilitating lexico-semantic access. In two experiments, participants were assigned to a kinesthetic motor-imagery training (KMI) group, in which they had to imagine making upper-limb movements, or to a static visual imagery training (SVI) group, in which they had to mentally visualize pictures of landscapes. Differential impacts of both training protocols on two different language comprehension tasks (i.e., semantic categorization and sentence-picture matching task) were investigated. Experiment 1 showed that KMI training can induce better performance (shorter reaction times) than SVI training for the two lan- guage comprehension tasks, thus suggesting that a KMI-based motor activation can facili- tate lexico-semantic access after only one training session. Experiment 2 aimed at replicating these results using a pre/post-training language assessment and a longer train- ing period (four training sessions spread over four days). Although the improvement magni- tude between pre- and post-training sessions was greater in the KMI group than in the SVI one on the semantic categorization task, the sentence-picture matching task tended to pro- vide an opposite pattern of results. Overall, this series of experiments highlights for the first time that motor imagery can contribute to the improvement of lexical-semantic processing and could open new avenues on rehabilitation methods for language deficits.
- Affiliations
Université Grenoble Alpes Laboratoire de Psychologie et NeuroCognition Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté INSERM UMR1093-CAPS Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne Defitech Chair of Clinical Neuroengineering, Center for Neuroprosthetics (CNP) and Brain Mind Institute (BMI)
Citations
Bonnet, C., & Bayram, M. (2022). Kinesthetic motor-imagery training improves performance on lexical-semantic access. PLOS ONE, 17(6), e0270352. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270352 (Original work published 2022)