On the functional relationship between language and motor processing in typewriting: an EEG study

The functional relationship between language and motor processing was investigated to elucidate whether it is better described in terms of a discrete or a continuous account of information flow. To this end, we recorded event-related potentials during a typewriting task that combined a semantic priming paradigm with a manipulation of response side (response initiated with right vs. left hand), and focused on the lateralised potentials indexing motor-response activation and inhibition. The critical issue was to assess whether, in the semantically related condition, the increased evidence for the target representation at the conceptual-lexical levels percolates into motor-response preparation, thus triggering an enhanced activation of the corresponding response hand, or whether lexical-semantic and motor-preparation processes unfold independently. Despite effective priming on response times, no selective influence of semantic relatedness was observed on motor-preparation potentials. These results are more compatible with a discrete account.