When push comes to shove

The ability to predict which patterns are formed in brain scans when imagining a celery or an airplane, based on how these concepts as words co-occur in texts, suggests that it is possible to model mental representations based on word statistics. Whether counting how frequently nouns and verbs combine in Google search queries, or extracting eigenvectors from matrices made up of Wikipedia lines and Shake- speare plots, these latent semantics approximate the associative links that form concepts. However, cognition is fundamentally intertwined with action; even passively reading verbs has been shown to acti- vate the same motor circuits as when we tap a finger or observe actual movements. If languages evolved by adapting to the brain, sensorimotor constraints linking articulatory gestures with aspects of motion might also be reflected in the statistics of word co-occurrences. To probe this hypothesis 3 × 20 emotion, face, and hand related verbs known to activate premotor areas in the brain were selected, to compute their mutual similarities using latent semantic analysis LSA, and subsequently compare the resulting adjacency matrices based on two different large scale text corpora; HAWIK and TASA. Applying hierarchical clustering to identify common structures across the two text corpora, the verbs largely divide into combined mouth and hand movements versus emotional expressions. Transforming the verbs into their constituent phonemes, and projecting them into an articulatory space framed by tongue height and formant frequencies, the clustered motion verbs contrast front versus back vowels framed by plosive attacks and stops resulting in increasing levels of arousal. Whereas the clustered facial expressions and emotional verbs incorporate sequences of close versus open jaw sonorants, generating up- or downwards shifts in formant frequencies that influence their perceived valence. Suggesting, that the latent semantics of action verbs capture dimensions of intensity and emotion constrained by articulatory gestures and acoustic characteristics.