Left parietal activation during multimodal deixis: preliminary results on prosodic, syntactic, manual and ocular pointing.
Résumé
Deixis, or pointing, is crucial in communication (Kita, 2003). Previous works suggest that manual pointing would recruit the left posterior parietal and frontal cortex (Astafiev et al., 2003). Prosodic and syntactic pointing would share a common neural network (Lœvenbruck et al., 2005). To test the hypothesis that multimodal deixis involves a common network, we designed an fMRI paradigm integrating four conditions: 1) prosodic focus, 2) syntactic extraction, 3) index finger pointing, 4) eye pointing.