A Dissociation Between Linguistic and Communicative Abilities in the Human Brain

Willems, Roel M. and Boer de, Miriam and Ruiter de, Jan Peter and Noordzij, Matthijs L. and Hagoort, Peter and Toni, Ivan (2010) A Dissociation Between Linguistic and Communicative Abilities in the Human Brain. Psychological Science, 21 (1). pp. 8-14. ISSN 0956-7976

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Abstract:	Although language is an effective vehicle for communication, it is unclear how linguistic and communicative abilities relate to each other. Some researchers have argued that communicative message generation involves perspective taking (mentalizing), and—crucially—that mentalizing depends on language. We employed a verbal communication paradigm to directly test whether the generation of a communicative action relies on mentalizing and whether the cerebral bases of communicative message generation are distinct from parts of cortex sensitive to linguistic variables. We found that dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a brain area consistently associated with mentalizing, was sensitive to the communicative intent of utterances, irrespective of linguistic difficulty. In contrast, left inferior frontal cortex, an area known to be involved in language, was sensitive to the linguistic demands of utterances, but not to communicative intent. These findings show that communicative and linguistic abilities rely on cerebrally (and computationally) distinct mechanisms.
Item Type:	Article
Copyright:	© 2010 by Association for Psychological Science
Faculty:	Behavioural Sciences (BS)
Research Group:	Cognitive Psychology and Ergonomics (CPE)
Link to this item:	http://purl.utwente.nl/publications/73308
Official URL:	http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797609355563
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