Text Comprehension after Brain Injury: An fMRI Study of Inference Processes in Patients with Anterior Temporal or Fronto-Medial Lesions

Text comprehension requires the continuous integration of utterances with both general world knowledge and the prior discourse context. These inference or coherence building processes have been shown to consistently activate the left fronto-medial cortex and anterior temporal regions bilaterally (Mazoyer et al., 1993; Ferstl & von Cramon, 2001, 2002). However, in behavioral tests, there was evidence for an inferencing deficit after left frontal lesions only, but not after anterior temporal lesions (Ferstl, Guthke & von Cramon, 2002). The goal of the present study was to characterize the network necessary for hig…