Indirect speech acts responding 'I forgot to wear my watch today' to someone who asked for the time are ubiquitous in daily conversation, but are understudied in current neurobiological models of language. To comprehend an indirect speech act like this one, listeners must not only decode the lexical-semantic content of the utterance, but also make a pragmatic, bridging inference. This inference allows listeners to derive the speaker's true, intended meaning in the above dialogue, for example, that the speaker cannot provide the time. In the present work, we address this major gap by asking non-aphasic patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD, n=21) and brain-damaged controls with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI, n=17) to judge simple question-answer dialogues of the form: 'Do you want some cake for dessert?' 'I'm on a very strict diet right now', and relate the results to structural and diffusion MRI. Accuracy and reaction time results demonstrate that subjects with bvFTD, but not MCI, are selectively impaired in indirect relative to direct speech act comprehension, due in part to their social and executive limitations, and performance is related to caregivers' judgment of communication efficacy. MRI imaging associates the observed impairment in bvFTD to cortical thinning not only in traditional language-associated regions, but also in fronto-parietal regions implicated in social and executive cerebral networks. Finally, diffusion tensor imaging analyses implicate white matter tracts in both dorsal and ventral projection streams, including superior longitudinal fasciculus, frontal aslant, and uncinate fasciculus. These results have strong implications for updated neurobiological models of language, and emphasize a core, language-mediated social disorder in patients with bvFTD.

中文翻译：

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不仅仅是语言：西尔维娅外神经解剖网络支持行为变异额颞痴呆的间接言语行为话语理解

对于要求时间的人来说，间接言语行为“我今天忘记戴手表了”，这在日常对话中无处不在，但在当前的语言神经生物学模型中却被忽视。为了理解这样的间接语音行为，听众不仅必须对话语的词汇语义内容进行解码，而且还必须进行务实的桥接推理。该推论允许听众在上述对话中得出说话者的真实意图意思，例如，说话者无法提供时间。在目前的工作中，我们通过询问行为失常的额颞叶痴呆（bvFTD，n = 21）和健忘性轻度认知障碍（MCI，n = 17）造成脑损伤的对照的非失语患者来判断这个简单的问题，回答以下形式的对话：您要甜点蛋糕吗？“我现在饮食很严格”，并将结果与​​结构和扩散核磁共振成像相关。准确性和反应时间的结果表明，相对于直接言语行为理解，间接影响有bvFTD而非MCI的受试者选择性地受损，部分原因是其社交和执行限制，并且表现与看护者对沟通功效的判断有关。MRI成像不仅在传统的与语言有关的区域中，而且在与社交和行政大脑网络有关的额顶区域中，将观察到的bvFTD损伤与皮质变薄相关联。最后，扩散张量成像分析将背侧和腹侧投影流中的白质束牵连在一起，包括上纵束，额斜，和束状束。这些结果对更新的语言神经生物学模型具有重要意义，并强调了bvFTD患者的核心语言介导的社会障碍。