When reading text or listening to someone speak, we construct rich mental models that allow us to draw conclusions about other people, objects, actions, events, mental states and contexts. This ability to understand written or spoken language, called "discourse comprehension," is a hallmark of the human mind and central to everyday social life. In a new study, researchers uncovered the brain mechanisms that underlie discourse comprehension.
Researchers compared the discourse comprehension abilities of patients with damage to specific brain regions relative to patients without damage to those regions. Each image here represents one slice of the brain and the highlighted areas are those that are important for discourse comprehension. (Credit: Aron Barbey)source: internet
