Functional neuroanatomy of the cognitive process of mapping during discourse comprehension

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify brain regi ons involved in the process of mapping coherent discourse onto a developing mental representation. We manipulated discourse coherence by presenting se ntences with definite articles (which lead to more coherent discourse) or i ndefinite articles (which lead to less coherent discourse). Comprehending c onnected discourse, compared with reading unrelated sentences, produced mor e neural activity in the right than left hemisphere of the frontal lobe. Th us, the right hemisphere of the frontal lobe is involved in some of the pro cesses underlying mapping. In contrast, left-hemisphere structures were ass ociated with lower-level processes in reading (such as word recognition and syntactic processing). Our results demonstrate the utility of using fMRI t o investigate the neural substrates of higher-level cognitive processes suc h as discourse comprehension.