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Neural correlates of action sequence prediction in communicative function understanding
Poster Session C, Thursday, October 1, 10:45 am - 12:45 pm, Wangari Maathai
Rosario Tomasello1,2; 1Potsdam University, 2Freie Universität Berlin
For decades, research in the neurobiology of language has focused on how linguistic symbols are processed in the human brain, particularly on the contribution of sensorimotor experiences to semantic representation and understanding. In everyday communication, however, language is rarely used merely to refer to objects or events; rather, it primarily serves to convey different communicative intentions in social interaction. Crucially, the same utterance can communicate different intentions depending on the context in which it is embedded, thereby conveying meaning that extends beyond the lexical-semantic content of the words themselves. In linguistic-pragmatic theory, such intentions are described as speech acts, embedded within complex contextual settings, interpersonal knowledge states, and action sequences. Here, I present a series of studies investigating the neural correlates of different communicative actions, including naming, requesting, questioning, and stating, conveyed through identical utterances across written, prosodic, and gestural modalities. Across studies, results consistently show that communicative function is accessed remarkably rapidly, around 150 ms after stimulus onset, in parallel with semantic processing. Importantly, communicative actions that imply a typical partner’s responses, such as handing over the request object or verbal responses during questions, elicit somatotopically organized activation in motor cortices (e.g., hand versus face areas). These findings highlight the role of the motor system during pragmatic understanding, suggesting that listeners rapidly predict the likely interactional consequences of communicative acts. Together, the results support a neurobiological account in which linguistic meaning and communicative intentions are rapidly processed within distributed action-perception networks in the human brain.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics, Speech Perception