Discourse-level comprehension engages medial frontal Theory of Mind brain regions even for expository texts.

In addition to understanding individual word meanings and processing the syntactic and semantic dependencies among those words within a sentence, language comprehension often requires constructing a higher-order discourse structure based on the relationships among clauses and sentences in the extended context. Prior fMRI studies of discourse-level comprehension have reported greater activation for texts than unconnected sentences in what-appear-to-be regions of the Theory of Mind (ToM) network. However, those studies have generally used narratives rich in mental state content, thus confounding coherence and content. We report an fMRI experiment where ToM regions were defined functionally in each participant, and their responses were examined to texts vs. sentence lists. Critically, we used expository texts to minimize mental state content. Medial frontal but not posterior ToM regions exhibited small but reliable increases in their responses to texts relative to unconnected sentences, suggesting a role for these regions in discourse comprehension independent of content.

除了了解单个单词含义并处理句子中这些单词之间的句法和语义依赖性外，语言理解通常还需要基于在扩展上下文中的条款和句子之间的关系来构建高级话语结构。对话语级别的理解力的fMRI研究报告了文本的激活比在心理理论（TOM）网络的未接近句子中的无连接句子更大。但是，这些研究通常使用了富含精神状态含量的叙述，从而使连贯性和内容混淆。我们报告了一个fMRI实验，在每个参与者中都在功能上定义了TOM区域，并检查了他们的响应对文本与句子列表。至关重要的是，我们使用说明性文本来最大程度地减少心理状态内容。内侧额叶而非后汤姆区域表现出对文本相对于未连接的句子的响应的较小但可靠的增加，这表明这些地区在话语中的作用独立于内容。