Means of normalized (sem) MEP peak-to-peak amplitudes in all experimental conditions of Experiments 1–3.

Tabled mean normalized MEP amplitude following the semantic and the syllabic processing of the hand-action (Hand-act), the non-hand action (Non-hand act) and the non action (Non-act) verbs in Experiments 1–3. The regions in bold type showed the facilitation in the semantic task and the inhibition in the syllabic task, for hand-action verbs only, as compared to non-action verbs (Experiment 3). A similar dissociation between tasks was not observed for the other verb categories in any of the three experiments.