Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access originally published online on September 12, 2006
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2006 1(2):107-121; doi:10.1093/scan/nsl018
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Developmental changes in the neural basis of interpreting communicative intent
1Department of Psychology, 2Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, and 3Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
Understanding the intended meaning of a remark beyond what is explicitly stated is an integral part of successful social interactions. Here, we examined the neural circuitry underlying the interpretation of communicative intent in children and adults using irony comprehension as a test case. Participants viewed cartoon drawings while listening to short scenarios ending with a potentially ironic remark and were asked to decide whether the speaker was being sincere or ironic. In both children and adults, instructions to attend to the cues provided by the speaker's facial expression or tone of voice modulated the activity in visual and language cortices, respectively. Overall, children engaged the medial prefrontal cortex and left inferior frontal gyrus more strongly than adults, whereas adults recruited the fusiform gyrus, extrastriate areas and the amygdala more strongly than children. Greater involvement of prefrontal regions in children may subserve the integration of multiple cues to reconcile the discrepancy between the literal and intended meaning of an ironic remark. This developmental shift from a reliance on frontal regions to posterior occipitotemporal regions may reflect the automatization of basic reasoning about mental states. This study is the first to examine developmental changes in the neural circuitry underlying natural language pragmatics.
Keywords: development; functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI); irony; language; theory of mind
Correspondence should be addressed to A. Ting Wang, Ph.D, Department of Psychiatry, The Mount Sinai School of Medicine, One Gustave L. Levy Place, Box 1230, New York, NY 10029-6574, USA. E-mail: ting.wang{at}mssm.edu
*Present address: A. Ting Wang is currently with the Department of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York USA.
Susan S. Lee is currently at the University of Rochester, School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, New York, USA.
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