Speakers and listeners usually interact in larger discourses than single words or even single sentences. The goal of the present study was to identify the neural bases reflecting how the mental representation of the situation denoted in a multi-sentence discourse (situation model) is constructed and shared between speakers and listeners. An fMRI study using a variant of the ambiguous text paradigm was designed. Speakers (n = 15) produced ambiguous texts in the scanner and listeners (n = 27) subsequently listened to these texts in different states of ambiguity: preceded by a highly informative, intermediately informative or no title at all. Conventional BOLD activation analyses in listeners, as well as inter-subject correlation analyses between the speakers' and the listeners' hemodynamic time courses were performed. Critically, only the processing of disambiguated, coherent discourse with an intelligible situation model representation involved (shared) activation in bilateral lateral parietal and medial prefrontal regions. This shared spatiotemporal pattern of brain activation between the speaker and the listener suggests that the process of memory retrieval in medial prefrontal regions and the binding of retrieved information in the lateral parietal cortex constitutes a core mechanism underlying the communication of complex conceptual representations.

说话者和听者通常在比单个单词甚至单个句子更大的语篇中进行交互。本研究的目的是确定神经基础，该神经基础反映了如何在说话者和听者之间构建和共享多句子话语（情境模型）中所表示的情境的心理表征。设计了使用歧义文本范例变体的功能磁共振成像研究。演讲者（n  = 15）在扫描仪和听众中产生了含糊的文字（n = 27）随后以不同的歧义状态收听了这些文本：在此之前是内容丰富，内容中等或根本没有标题。进行了听众的常规BOLD激活分析，以及演讲者和听众的血液动力学时间过程之间的受试者间相关性分析。至关重要的是，只有具有清晰的情境模型表示的歧义，连贯的话语处理才涉及到双侧顶叶和内侧前额叶区域中的（共享）激活。