CEREBRAL CORRELATES OF MULTIMODAL POINTING: AN FMRI STUDY OF PROSODIC FOCUS, SYNTACTIC EXTRACTION, DIGITAL- AND OCULAR- POINTING

Hélène Loevenbruck1, Coriandre Vilain1, Francesca Carota2, Monica Baciu3, Christian Abry1, Cédric Pichat3, Laurent Lamalle4 & Christoph Segebarth5
1ICP, Speech and Cognition Department, GIPSA-lab; 2Institut des Sciences Cognitives; 3Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurocognition; 4INSERM IFR 1; 5INSERM U594

ID 1658
[full paper]

Deixis or pointing plays a crucial role in language acquisition and speech communication and can be conveyed in several modalities. The aim of this paper is to explore the cerebral substrate of multimodal pointing. We present an fMRI study of pointing including: 1) index finger pointing, 2) eye pointing, 3) prosodic focus, 4) syntactic extraction. Fifteen subjects were examined while they gave digital, ocular and oral responses inside the 3T imager. Results of a random effect group analysis show that digital and prosodic pointings recruit the parietal lobe bilaterally, while ocular and syntactic pointings do not. A grammaticalization process is suggested to explain the lack of parietal activation in the syntactic condition. Further analyses are carried out on the link between digital and prosodic parietal activations.