Neuro-physiological evidence of linguistic empathy processing in the human brain: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study

Successful sentence comprehension requires not only syntactic and lexico-semantic processing, but also the processing of peripheral linguistic phenomena. However, less research attention has been focused on the latter. In order to examine whether the processing of linguistic empathy is psycho- and neuro-physiological in the human brain, we compared behavioral and brain activity data during the processing of an Ageru sentence with those of processing a Kureru sentence in Japanese, which are different from each other in terms of the processing of linguistic empathy. While we found no statistical difference in behavioral data between the two conditions but a statistically much greater activation in the left premotor area for the processing of the Kureru sentence than for the processing of the Ageru sentence. However, taken together with previous findings, our functional magnetic resonance imaging results suggest that the left premotor activation reflects not the processing of linguistic empathy per se, but rather the attentional shifting process of linguistic empathy in Kureru sentence comprehension.