A Dissociation Between Linguistic and Communicative Abilities in the Human Brain

摘要

Although language is an effective vehicle for communication, it is unclear how linguistic and communicative abilities relate toeach 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 whetherthe generation of a communicative action relies on mentalizing and whether the cerebral bases of communicative messagegeneration 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, irrespectiveof linguistic difficulty. In contrast, left inferior frontal cortex, an area known to be involved in language, was sensitive to thelinguistic demands of utterances, but not to communicative intent. These findings show that communicative and linguisticabilities rely on cerebrally (and computationally) distinct mechanisms.