Representing linguistic communicative goals in the premotor cortex

Abstract

SummaryLinguistic communication is often regarded as an action conveying the speaker’s communicative goal to the addressee. With both correlational (an fMRI study) and causal (a lesion study) evidence, we demonstrated that communicative goals are represented in human premotor cortex. Participants read scripts each containing a sentence said by the speaker with a goal of either a promise, a request, or a reply. The fMRI results showed that the premotor cortex represented more information on communicative goals than the perisylvian language regions. The lesion study results showed that, relative to healthy controls, the understanding of communicative goals was impaired in patients with lesions in the premotor cortex, whereas no reliable difference between the healthy controls and lesion controls. These findings convergently suggest that the premotor cortex is crucial for representing the goals conveyed by language, supporting the theoretical view that linguistic communication can be seen as a goal-directed action.