Basically some scientists realized that tool use and linguistic comprehension share motor cortex. If subjects were primed with a plier task, they did better on syntactic comprehension afterward, and vice versa. Proficiency at the tasks was also correlated, implying that someone being good with tools also tended to be good at understanding language, because both tasks use the same brain areas. One of the outcomes of the study is that motor training will probably start to be used in language recovery.
What's interesting about the study to me is language more or less being equivalent to a tool as far as what the brain uses to process the tasks. We use a lot of spatial metaphors (he's moving on up, word gets around) that bridge the gap between the physical and conceptual. It seems that using a hammer and understanding "the man and the dog ran down the street" are different abstractions of the same thing—a sort of orientation grid for both the physical and conceptual. I don't know if that makes a lot of sense or how to explain why that matters.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/11/211111154244.htm
