Language and action are of different kinds

From childhood, our active vocabulary grows to about 20,000 words, which we link together according to certain rules to form an infinite number of linguistic expressions. Since sentences are superficially just strings of words, similar to the sequence of motor actions, it has been argued that the processing of language and actions share a common cognitive lineage in the form of overlapping neural resources. Our work challenges this parallelism and instead demonstrates the independence of language and action processing.