Research project CIV - Communicative Individual Variance in Young Adulthood

For instance, the utterance "it is hot in here" will in some circumstances mean "can you open the window?". This would be an example of a so-called indirect speech act. It is however not known whether communicative skills such as recognizing speech acts 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 so called "pragmatic" skills in the general population. In the scanner, participants listened to dialogs, and the analysis strategy was based on differentiating brain activity associated with direct vs indirect speech acts, and finding individual differences in brain activity that corresponded to behavioral performance.

Based on the results, we argue that contextualized and multimodal communication requires neurocognitive networks partly different from those associated with core language, ToM/complex emotion processing, and cognitive control.