Incongruence of grammatical subjects activates brain regions involved in perspective taking in a sentence-sentence verification task

Publication date: August 2020Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics, Volume 55Author(s): Toshiki Iwabuchi, Masato Ohba, Kenji Ogawa, Toshio InuiAbstractVarious sentences can describe the same event from different perspectives (e.g., “John kicked Mike.” and “Mike was kicked by John.”). Humans can easily verify propositional equivalence of these sentences, but the underlying brain mechanisms are unclear. The present study examined whether the perspective taking system is involved in the verification of propositional equivalence between two sentences having different grammatical subjects, using a functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants were required to observe a picture and to verbalize it silently by encoding a visually cued person as the grammatical subject. Then, we presented a sentence whose grammatical subject was either congruent or incongruent with the previous one. Participants judged whether the meanings of these sentences were matched. Comparing the incongruent condition to the congruent condition, we found increased activation in the regions involved in perspective taking of another person. This suggests that perspective switching takes place in the incongruent condition.
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research