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Abstract:
In Cerebral Palsy (CP) children commonly experience semantic deficits. The cause of semantic deficits, and persistence into adulthood, are unknown. The social network hypothesis states decreased frequency of language use in CP individuals leads to impoverished lexico-semantic representations. The embodied cognition hypothesis emphasizes the role of the motor system in processing action concepts. In this study, participants first completed a sentence-reading task while their event related potentials (ERPs) to semantically incongruent sentences were collected. No evidence was found that CP individuals process domain-general semantic incongruence differently to neurotypicals. Participants then made action decisions on lower-limb (kick), and psychological verbs (believe) in an identity-priming paradigm. The ERP component of interest was the N400. There was no evidence to suggest CP individuals have action verb impairments. If the motor system contributes but is not necessary for action semantics, then participants may present no deficits when compared to neurotypicals as shown here.