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There is substantial evidence to support grounded theories of semantic representation, however the mechanisms of simulation in most theories are underspecified. In the present study, we used an individual differences approach to test whether motor imagery may share some mechanisms with sensorimotor simulations engaged during semantic processing. We quantified individual differences in motor imagery ability via implicit imagery tasks and explicit imagery questionnaires and tested their relationship to sensorimotor effects in syntactic classification tasks. In Experiment 1 (N = 185) we tested relationships between motor imagery and semantic processing of body-object interaction meaning (BOI; the degree to which you can interact with a word's referent) and foot/leg action meaning. We observed two interactions between imagery ability measured on the Florida Praxis Imagery Questionnaire (FPIQ) and BOI …