Discourse Comprehension

To comprehend a discourse requires going beyond recognizing individual words or even comprehending sentences to integrate a sequence of sentences into a meaningful structure. Integration happens at multiple levels. At the lowest level, cohesion refers to connections between clauses or sentences based on syntactic structure and semantic relatedness. At a higher level, coherence refers to content-based ties between successive sentences based on features such as shared location. The highest level of integration is the construction of a situation model that represents the situation described by a discourse. Constructing these representations depends not only on left perisylvian brain areas classically associated with language but also on an extended network of additional brain regions, including right hemisphere areas. Most notably, the dorso-medial prefrontal cortex is important for inferencing and the posterior cingulate cortex is involved during situation model building and shifting. Establishing situation models also depends on content-specific representations that are widely distributed. Signatures of discourse-specific processing can be seen in online behavioral measures, functional neuroimaging, and electrophysiological responses.