Multiple Sclerosis (MS) patients could experience communicative deficits in “pragmatics”, which is the ability to integrate context-dependent aspects of meaning beyond structural components of language. We evaluated relationships between pragmatics and functional connectivity (FC) of the bilateral inferior parietal lobule (the so-called Geschwind’s areas -GA-), in MS patients via a seed-based Resting-State fMRI analysis. We found a direct correlation between pragmatic scores and FC of both right (p=0.003) and left (p=0.009) GAs with the paracingulate cortex. Our results suggest that language is not only a left hemisphere function, and highlight a possible central role of paracingulate cortex in pragmatics.
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