Embodied negation and levels of concreteness: A TMS study on German and Italian language processing

•TMS was applied to German and Italian affirmative and negative sentences.•The negative marker reduces MEPs irrespectively from its position in the sentence.•The effect of negation starts already 250 ms after the onset of the negative marker.•Affirmative concrete sentences show greater MEP amplitudes than abstract ones. According to the embodied cognition perspective, linguistic negation may block the motor simulations induced by language processing. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was applied to the left primary motor cortex (hand area) of monolingual Italian and German healthy participants during a rapid serial visual presentation of sentences from their own language. In these languages, the negative particle is located at the beginning and at the end of the sentence, respectively. The study investigated whether the interruption of the motor simulation processes, accounted for by reduced motor evoked potentials (MEPs), takes place similarly in two languages differing on the position of the negative marker. Different levels of sentence concreteness were also manipulated to investigate if negation exerts generalized effects or if it is affected by the semantic features of the sentence. Our findings indicate that negation acts as a block on motor representations, but independently from the language and words concreteness level.