Neurobiological models of language disagree about the degree of neural overlap between the speaking and understanding. To test these hypothesis, participants (N = 37) were asked to name out-loud object names and passively listen to the same words — minimal pairs only differing in their first phoneme, alveolar as in ‘Talon’ vs. bilabial as in ‘Ballon’). For both language modalities, the motor cortex was activated topographically, i.e. with stronger tongue activity for alveolar words and stronger lip activity for bilabial words. The temporal cortex was activated in a distributed manner. These results strongly support Integration Models (e.g., Pulvermüller, 1999; 2018; Strikers & Costa, 2016), which posit shared word representations for language production and comprehension.
Dmitrieva, X., Anton, J.-L., Fairs, A., Ivanova, B., Sein, J., Nazarian, B.,
Dufour, S., Pulvermüller, F., Runnqvist, E., & Strijkers, K.
(2025). Cerebral Cortex, 35(10), bhaf275. — @HAL