Abstract
Face-to-face communication requires skills that go beyond core language abilities. In dialogue, we routinely make inferences beyond the literal meaning of utterances and distinguish between different speech acts based on, e.g., contextual cues. It is, however, not known whether such communicative skills potentially overlap with core language skills or other capacities, such as theory of mind (ToM). In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study we investigate these questions by capitalizing on individual variation in pragmatic skills in the general population. Based on behavioral data from 199 participants, we selected participants with higher vs. lower pragmatic skills for the fMRI study (N = 57). In the scanner, participants listened to dialogues including a direct or an indirect target utterance. The paradigm allowed participants at the whole group level to (passively) distinguish indirect from direct speech acts, as evidenced by a robust activity difference between these speech acts in an extended language network including ToM areas. Individual differences in pragmatic skills modulated activation in two additional regions outside the core language regions (one cluster in the left lateral parietal cortex and intraparietal sulcus and one in the precuneus). The behavioral results indicate segregation of pragmatic skill from core language and ToM. In conclusion, contextualized and multimodal communication requires a set of interrelated pragmatic processes that are neurocognitively segregated: (1) from core language and (2) partly from ToM.
Highlights
Dialog constitutes a fundamental form of human communication (Levinson, 2006)
3.2.4 Overlap between “Indirect vs Direct” interaction between groups result, and the Language, Theory of Mind (ToM) and multiple demand (MD)/cognitive control networks Table 8 presents the results of the analysis described in Section 2.8.3, where neurosynth masks were used to estimate the overlap between the core language, ToM and MD/cognitive control networks on one hand and the parietal and precuneus cluster found in the “Indirect vs Direct” interaction analysis, on the other hand
In an established paradigm comparing indirect vs direct speech acts across all participants, we report our first results as expected activations in core language regions and beyond
Summary
Dialog constitutes a fundamental form of human communication (Levinson, 2006). In accordance with this suggestion, being able to communicate face-to-face with another person may require skills that go beyond “core” language skills, such as lexical retrieval or syntactic composition. 1.1 Neurocognitive dissociation of pragmatics from core language, ToM and Cognitive Control Functions In this paper, we are adopting a neuroscience approach to contribute an additional perspective on the complex knowledge domain of pragmatics and its representation in the human brain. This approach enables us to investigate whether there are specific neural signatures of pragmatic skill, or whether these skills rather draw on general cognitive skills as would be indicated by modulation of activity in three other networks: the left-lateralized perisylvian language network, the ToM network and multiple demand (MD) network subserving executive functions. As our primary test bed, we chose indirect speech acts, as interpreting their communicative meaning requires fully-fledged context-based pragmatic inferencing
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