Pragmatic competence demands linguistic, but also communicative, social and cognitive competence. Successful use of language in social interaction requires mutual understanding of the speaker’s intentions; without it, a conversation cannot proceed. The term speech act refers to what a speaker intends to accomplish when saying something. The purpose of this study was to contribute to the identification of the neural substrate of speech act recognition and to the characterization of the cognitive processes that may be involved. The recognition of speech acts resulted in greater activation of frontal regions, precuneus and posterior cingulate gyrus. From all cognitive and behavioral measures obtained, only the scores in mental flexibility predicted the change in blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal in the precuneus. These results, support the idea that speech act recognition requires the inference of intention, executive functions, including memory and entails the activation of areas of social cognition that participate in several brain networks i.e., the Intention Processing, the Default Mode and Theory of Mind networks, and areas involved in planning and guiding behavior.

语用能力不仅需要语言能力，还需要交际、社交和认知能力。在社交互动中成功使用语言需要相互理解说话者的意图；没有它，对话就无法进行。言语行为一词是指说话者在说某事时打算完成的事情。本研究的目的是有助于识别语音行为识别的神经基质，并有助于表征可能涉及的认知过程。对言语行为的识别导致额叶区域、楔前叶和后扣带回的更大程度的激活。从获得的所有认知和行为测量中，只有心理灵活性的分数可以预测楔前叶中血氧水平依赖 (BOLD) 信号的变化。这些结果，