Are judgments for action verbs and point-light human actions equivalent?

Christel Bidet-Ildei, Lucette Toussaint

The aim of the present study was to examine whether the ability to judge action words and the ability to judge human actions share common mechanisms. With this purpose in mind, we proposed both a lexical and an action decision task to twenty-four healthy participants. For both tasks, the participants had to judge whether the stimulus that was presented (a letter string or a point-light sequence) was valid or not (i.e. a word vs. a pseudo-word, an action vs. a pseudo-action). The data analysis showed that the action decision task has common characteristics with the lexical decision task. As for verbal material, judgements of pseudo-actions were slower than judgements for actions. Moreover, we demonstrated that the ability to judge an action verb was positively correlated with the ability to judge a point-light human action, whereas no significant correlation appeared between nouns and point-light judgements abilities. This dissociation supports the argument that the judgement of action words and the judgement of human actions share a common but specific basis through the involvement of motor representations.