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correspond if the observer were doing the same thing. Another way to say this is that there is a resonant response in an observer’s motor system to observing a behavior and this may potentiate a degree of social coordination and connection, as discussed in Semin’s chapter. This kind of neural resonance has been shown to play a role in understanding speech when seeing a talker’s mouth move, even if the listener does not actually make any mouth movements.

Mirror neurons demonstrate that observed action can produce a resonant response in an observer’s brain. Seeing a talker’s mouth move creates a motor-resonant response that aids in understanding speech sounds. However, these two observations are very different from the idea that the meaning of sentences can create a resonant response in the listener’s brain. In the case of speech, mouth movements are the actions that create speech. This might seem like a very special case. The traditional linguistic view of language is that words and sentences are symbolic: Language describing action is not action itself. Language describing emotion is not the emotion itself. The entire concept of a symbol is that a symbol denotes something, stands for something, but the symbol is not the thing itself. But it now appears that this long-held notion may be wrong.

The idea that seeing an object or event gives rise to brain states that resonate with previous experiences of that thing suggests a mechanism for language understanding to go beyond symbolic interpretation. Given that there is a brain mechanism for re-experiencing actions or sensations, this same mechanism may operate even when there is just a symbolic linguistic description. Understanding language may take place by invoking such resonant past experiences in the brain.

For example, when listening to sentences about hockey action, hockey players show neural activity in their motor system which is not seen for people who are naïve to hockey.⁴ Experience playing hockey recruits the motor system in service of understanding hockey sentences as if one were watching or playing hockey when only listening to speech. This suggests one way in which language can have a direct impact on a listener. Rather than making inferences about actions based on the meanings of sentences, understanding a sentence may be a resonant motor system response in the listener to a description of an action. If this idea is extended more broadly, language impact may come from such resonant responses. Language understanding and the impact of language may result from processes more similar to the effects of hearing laughter. Hearing a sentence may create in a listener a set of resonant responses very similar to the patterns that correspond to the actual situations being described.

Such resonant responses need not be confined to the motor system and actions. Emotions such as fear or joy may be empathically evoked in listeners by speech just as a scream or laughter might. Verbal expression of attitudes may produce similar attitudinal responses in listeners. Moreover, if a listener’s resonant response is strong, there may be increased empathic overlap with the speaker, which may serve to increase social connection. To the extent that people speak together and share feelings, social connection may increase as well.

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