Processing communicative intentions recruits a common neural network regardless of the expressive modalities

Communication is a social activity of a combined effort of at least two participants, who consciously and intentionally cooperate to construct together the meaning of their interaction. Discerning the meaning of a communication act requires more than just comprehending the meaning of words and having a mastery of grammar: Communication cannot be reduced to a mere encoding/decoding process and requires the capacity to represent others people’s mental states. Using a story completion task presented in comic strip form, in the present fMRI study we analyze whether communicative intention processing is affected by the expressive means through which a communicative intention is conveyed, i.e., the linguistic or extralinguistic gestural modality. Our findings show a common neural network recruited for communicative intention processing regardless of the modality used to convey a communicative intention. Additional brain areas outside those involved in communicative intention processing are specifically engaged by the particular communicative mean, reflecting distinct modality-specific sensory gateways to the previous network. Perisylvian language areas are recruited by the linguistic modality, while sensorimotor and premotor areas are recruited by the extralinguistic modality.