The results of the work indicate that the same social semantic network identified in previous
«Our article was generally based ontwo lines of work, the first of which showed that a specific brain network deciphers the social meanings of words. For example, in previous research, we found that thinking with high socio-semantic verb richness (e.g., hug and trust) produced stronger activation than thinking with low socio-semantic verb richness (e.g., walking and inferring).
Research text
The new study is also based onprevious findings, which suggest that most brain regions in this hypothetical social semantic network are more sensitive to sentence- and discourse-level meanings than to word-level meanings.
In other words, it was found that these areasbrains are more active when people process sentences or discourse than a list of words. Moreover, these activation patterns appear to gradually change as a person attempts to learn a language.
The authors hypothesized that this social semantic brain network not only represents the social meanings of words, but also accumulates knowledge about the connections between them.
The researchers tested this hypothesis inan experiment where participants read stories, sentences, and word lists inside an fMRI scanner. These narratives, sentences, and word lists were constructed using an identical group of words, and the social semantic meaning of all narratives, sentences, and words was processed.
They found that brain regions involved insemantic processing were more active when people read narrative texts than when they read lists of words. Moreover, the authors of the work noticed that their activation can be more global if entire texts have a social meaning.
On the whole, these results confirm the hypothesis aboutthe fact that the social semantic network of the brain not only participates in the representation of individual socially significant words, but also supports the accumulation of social meanings in a longer text.
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