Where do we predict communicative function? New arguments for the relevance of sensorimotor brain areas in language...

Human language is inherently social, requiring listeners to anticipate not only linguistic content but also a speaker's upcoming communicative action. Recent research suggests that language processing involves parallel predictions at multiple linguistic levels, including phonological, lexical, semantic and pragmatic ones. While semantic prediction is well established, the neural correlates of predicting an utterance's communicative function remain unclear. We examined pragmatic predictions during the anticipation of naming versus request speech acts by measuring the pre-stimulus prediction potential (PP) and localising its cortical sources. Source reconstruction showed stronger pre-stimulus activation in sensorimotor regions when participants predicted a request compared to when they predicted naming. This anticipatory motor pattern mirrors previously reported post-stimulus differences between these speech acts and supports the view that, in the same way as semantic information, the brain sources of the prediction potential reflect anticipated information. Overall, these results indicate that listeners pre-activate communicative-action representations before the relevant word is perceived, supporting a predictive view in which pragmatic expectations are instantiated in the neural generators of anticipatory activity.