Individual Differences in Indirect Speech Act Processing Found Outside the Language Network

Abstract

Face-to-face communication requires skills that go beyond core language abilities. In dialog, 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 fMRI study we investigate these questions by capitalizing on individual variation in pragmatic skills in the general population. Based on behavioral data from 201 participants, we selected participants with higher vs lower pragmatic skills for the fMRI-study (N = 57). In the scanner, participants listened to dialogs 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 inter-related pragmatic processes that are neurocognitively segregated: (1) from core language and (2) partly from ToM.

When did you stop speaking to yourself? Age-related differences in adolescents’ world knowledge-based audience design

“…The utilization of such tasks to outline the developmental trajectory of pragmatic production is valuable, considering that the ability to use information about others’ perspectives in communicative contexts has been shown to correlate with adolescents’ self-reported peer relations [ 74 , 75 ], which in turn play a deciding role in their social life and psychological well-being [ 76 ]. Ultimately, variation in pragmatic processing developmentally could explain adult individual differences in AD, which are large [ 5 ].…”

“…The referential production task was modified from two prior studies [ 3 , 5 ]. Its aim was to measure adolescents’ ability to adapt their referential expressions to the inferred world knowledge of their interlocutor.…”

“…When describing the general conversational conduct of children, Piaget stated that children under the age of 7 virtually speak to themselves [ 1 ]. This can be seen as an early observation that young children do not engage in what is frequently termed audience design (AD) [ 2 ] to the same extent as adults [ 3 – 5 ]. AD entails adjusting utterances to suit the needs of interlocutors.…”

“…Our previous investigations [ 3 , 5 ] suggest that 7-year-olds do not adhere to the maxim of quantity by tailoring utterances to the inferred world knowledge of addressees, to the same extent as adults. We are interested in the adolescent period as variation in this ability, since it might explain the substantial individual differences in the same ability that we observed in young adults [ 5 ]. In other words, we hypothesize that this ability develops in adolescence—a transitional period during which an individual’s social world becomes increasingly peer-oriented and complex [ 7 ].…”

“…Developmentally, no link between EF (working memory, inhibition and cognitive flexibility) and the ability to provide sufficiently detailed referential expressions was observed when younger children participated in a visual perspective-taking task (years: 4–5) [ 20 ], whereas a link between EF subfunctions (cognitive flexibility, working memory) and children’s ability to successfully produce sufficiently detailed, as well as repair insufficient referential expressions, has repeatedly been observed in 4- to 6-year-olds [ 41 , 42 ]. On the adult side, the literature is also mixed, but a recent large-scale study found no correlation between world knowledge-based AD and working memory capacity in adults (see [ 5 ] and references therein).…”