Collective Brain Alignment During Story Reception: Shared Neural Responses in French, Chinese, and English Listeners of Le Petit Prince, 小王子, or The Little Prince

How Stories Prompt Brain Activity Along the Sensation-to-Cognition Continuum

When individuals listen to a narrated story, this sets forth a complex, but orderly cascade of internal neurocognitive responses that can be measured via neuroimaging (Margulies et al., 2016; Mesulam, 1998). Initially, the sounds entering the ear are transformed into neural impulses, which then travel along the auditory nerve into the brain. The early auditory cortex analyzes basic sensory² and perceptual aspects of this incoming stimulus, such as its frequency content (Saenz & Langers, 2014). At a subsequent stage of information processing, neurocognitive processes related to word-level analysis (e.g., parsing, lexical retrieval, etc.) are engaged, which in turn provides the basis for yet more abstract analyses of words in the context of other words (e.g., sentence-level and syntactic neurolinguistic processes). The neural processes underlying these computations are increasingly understood (Caucheteux et al., 2021; Toneva et al., 2020; Wehbe et al., 2014), and their functional neuroanatomy has been mapped out in hundreds of auditory neuroscience and neurolinguistic studies (de Heer et al., 2017; Huth et al., 2016; Specht, 2014). Last, the breakthrough success of large language models has further emboldened these notions of parallel and distributed neural networks as a biological and computational mechanism of language³ (Goldstein et al., 2022; Hale et al., 2021).

However, it is obvious that beyond sensoryperceptual and linguistic processes, stories evoke a host of additional processes, such as those related to social cognition and story understanding (Grall et al., 2021; Green et al., 2003). As neuroimaging advanced over the past two decades, more and more studies also have begun to address the brain basis of these processes, which are key for their impact and success (Ferstl et al., 2008; Mar, 2011; Willems et al., 2020). Although this literature is too voluminous to review extensively here, we know that processes related to story cognition recruit post-perceptual and extralinguistic brain systems, such as the so-called salience, the executive control, and particularly the default mode networks (Ferstl et al., 2008; Mar, 2011; Menon, 2015; Schmälzle & Grall, 2020; Schmälzle et al., 2013; Yeshurun et al., 2021). Thus, to understand how the brain responds to stories beyond auditory and linguistic mechanisms alone, additional regions across the whole brain need examination. In particular need of examination is the default-mode network (DMN), a system that integrates incoming sensory-perceptual information (e.g., word order or spacing, vocal tone, etc.) with the broader context and situational model (e.g., keeping track of characters and events over the entire story) (Grall et al., 2021; Hasson et al., 2015; Lerner et al., 2011; Mesulam, 1998; Yeshurun et al., 2021). Given the DMN’s role in integrating this information, the DMN has often been described as having sense-making functions.

In conclusion, this continuum from sensation to cognition offers a guiding theoretical framework for understanding how the brain reacts to narrated stories: As people process a story, such as ‘Le Petit Prince,’ auditory regions should be sensitive to over-time variations of sound-level characteristics, perisylvian regions should be modulated by variations in word- and sentence-level linguistic properties, and brain systems beyond audition and language processing should respond to features that go beyond the information extracted during previous analyses, i.e., making sense of the influx of information by integrating it into a meaningful internal model of the unfolding story (Kintsch, 1998; Lerner et al., 2011; Yeshurun et al., 2021).

Why Listening to the Same Story Induces Temporally Aligned Brain Responses Across Audience Members

The previous section provides a general model for how a story is analyzed in the brain of one single individual along a continuum that ranges from sensation (hearing sounds) to perception (analyzing language) to cognition (understanding the story and following it over time). In this section, we provide a rationale for why listening to the same story should evoke similar brain activity along this continuum across the brains of audience members.

Considering the reception of a story from a communication perspective, it is apparent that a story provides the same content to all recipients (i.e., one-to-many type of communication). For example, the ‘Le Petit Prince’ story that will be the focus of this paper comprises a temporal sequence of words that is identical for all readers or listeners. Thus, if this identical temporal word sequence (i.e., the same story) is received and processed by different individuals’ brains, we would expect this to set forth similar neurocognitive processes at different levels of the sensation-to-cognition continuum. To the extent that people’s brains are similar in terms of structure and functions, which we know is the case, we can expect that the same story (or word sequence) would also induce similar processes in auditory brain regions, language-related brain regions, and regions involved in narrative processing (Grady et al., 2022; Grall et al., 2021; Nguyen et al., 2019). This reasoning of brain’s functioning similarly has been termed extended neurocognitive network model (Schmälzle, 2022) because the logic expands Mesulam’s classical sensation-to-cognition framework to encompass situations where multiple brains are exposed to the same stimulus, or nearly identical stimuli, such as a story, a movie, or other types of mass communication. A more elaborate discussion of the theoretical framework and its connection to communication science is provided in communication science (Schmälzle, 2022; Schmälzle & Grall, 2020a) and neuroscience articles (Hasson et al., 2012; Zadbood et al., 2017).

Measuring Story-Induced Temporal Alignment of Brain Activity Via the Inter-Subject Correlation Approach and Previous Findings

The inter-subject correlation (ISC) approach provides a principled framework to examine this story-induced temporal alignment of brain activity (Hasson et al., 2012; Nummenmaa et al., 2018; Schmälzle & Grall, 2020a). At its heart, this approach involves cross-correlating brain activity time series from recipients who were exposed to the same stimulus. This approach works on a region-by-region basis, or correlating brain responses in corresponding brain regions, like auditory cortex activity in listener 1 to the auditory cortex activity in listener 2, frontal cortex activity in listener 1 to frontal cortex activity in listener 2, and so forth. The resulting ‘inter-subject correlation’ maps reveal the degree to which the brain responses evoked by a common stimulus, such as a story, resemble each other across members of an audience over time and where in the brain this inter-subjective alignment occurs.

Previous work using the ISC framework for audience response measurement has yielded several key insights (Hasson et al., 2010; Lerner et al., 2011). First, we know that shared responses in the auditory cortex are relatively obligatory and primarily driven by the sensory properties of individual sounds. For instance, when people are presented with the same auditory stimulus, their auditory cortices show very similar responses, but when the sound is altered for one individual, that particular individual’s auditory cortex activity will decouple from the rest.

Second, as we proceed further along the sensation-to-cognition continuum, the degree of shared brain responses becomes less a function of the specific input stimulus, and more a function of the match between the stimulus input and existing knowledge structures or regional processing sensitivities. To illustrate, if people are presented with a story in a language of which they are in command⁴, then their brain activity in languagerelated regions will correlate relatively strongly across brains (Honey et al., 2012). However, if a person is not in command of the language, then this person’s brain activity will be less similar to that of others, and she/he will not be able to understand the story.

Third, it has also been shown that shared responses in post-perceptual brain regions are sensitive to manipulations of higher-level content or audience properties (Chen et al., 2017; Schmälzle et al., 2013). For instance, if people are given different prior information and then exposed to the same story, people who received the same prior information exhibit more similar brain responses (Yeshurun et al., 2017).

To summarize the logic so far, we assert that the story-evoked brain responses along the sensationto- cognition continuum constitute the nuts and bolts of story reception processes, and computing ISC analysis allows us to reveal how these brain systems become engaged and temporally aligned while audience members are processing the same story (Schmälzle & Grall, 2020a). Starting with sensory processes in the auditory cortex, it is clear that listeners’ auditory cortices respond with similar, i.e., time-aligned responses, as they respond to the incoming acoustic stimulus. However, as the sensory input is transformed into cognition, a purely stimulus-driven explanation of the resulting time-aligned brain responses falls short of explaining why ISC emerges in areas beyond the auditory cortex. In the following section, we will present the rationale for why we expect that even different versions (translations) of the same story should induce temporally aligned responses across listeners’ brains.

The Case for Aligned Responses to Different Story Versions in Sense-Making Regions

Previous work examining temporally coupled brain responses to stories and related narrative stimuli suggests that similar responses in postperceptual brain regions, such as the precuneus or prefrontal cortex, are associated with more complex cognitive processes (e.g., short-term memory, interpretive framework, sense-making). For example, Tikka et al. (2018) investigated which brain regions responded to narrative content regardless of the media form presenting the narrative content. Specifically, participants were presented either with a short movie or the script of the movie. The results revealed that responses in higher-level brain regions were similar despite the different physical input. Similarly, Nguyen et al. (2019) presented either a visual animation or narrated version of a Heider-Simmer-type social short story (Heider & Simmel, 1944). They again found similar responses independent of the presentation modality, and additionally similar brain activity between participants during story reception predicted similar interpretations.

In a similar vein, we may assume that recipients across the different language communities might still show similar responses in regions involved in sense-making and story cognition – regardless of whether a story, such as the famous ‘Le Petit Prince’, is presented as the French original, the Chinese version ‘小王子’, or the English ‘The Little Prince’ rendition. Although this reasoning is plausible and consistent with the latest research on brain responses to stories, only a few neuroimaging studies have examined these questions. Perhaps the strongest supporting evidence for cross-language similarities comes from a study by Honey et al. (2012), who played the same story to Russian and English listeners. However, this story was relatively short, the sample size was low, and the story was manipulated to be maximally comparable across languages. As such, there is a need for replications with larger and more diverse samples, and with different narratives (Turner et al., 2019). Therefore, the current study addresses the question of whether, where, and how temporally aligned audience brain responses arise in the brains of listeners exposed to translations of the same story (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Conceptual overview of the study design and main predictionsNote. We expect that processing the same sounds, hearing and understanding the speech, and following the story events should evoke similar, temporally aligned brain responses along the sensation-to-cognition continuum, as indexed by robust inter-subject correlations (ISC) within each language group (H1a). Moreover, this effect should be similarly expressed across the three groups (H1b). To the extent that higher-level, post-perceptual brain regions are not responding to the immediate properties of the incoming stimulus but to more abstracted information, we can further expect that these regions should exhibit similar responses even across different-language versions of the same story (H2).

The Present Study and Hypotheses

This study examines how the brains of French, Chinese, and English listeners respond during the reception of the ‘Le Petit Prince’ story told in their respective languages. Based on the model discussed above, we were interested in examining temporally aligned brain responses to the same story within and across language communities.

First, we can expect that (H1a) listeners will exhibit strongly aligned responses to the specific story they are exposed to. Specifically, as French listeners listen to the French story, their brains should exhibit very similar neural processes (indexed by robust ISC) in brain regions involved in audition (because they receive the same auditory input and thus should respond with similar over-time responses to the timevarying input). The same applies to each of the other audiences composed of Chinese or English listeners, respectively. Moreover, there should be strong ISC in language-related regions (e.g., inferior frontal gyrus, medial temporal gyrus), again among (or within) members of each language community (because the story comes in a language that the recipients possess the necessary knowledge to decode/understand). Finally, there should be robust, albeit less strong ISC in regions beyond language-sensitive cortex. These include the medial frontal cortex, the anterior cingulate, the precuneus, and other parts of the salience, executive, or default mode system. In sum, we expect a pattern of ISC that follows the general sensation-to-cognition continuum – and this pattern should be evident for each of the groups (i.e., French listeners exposed to the story in the ‘Le Petit Prince’ version, Chinese Listeners exposed to ‘小王子’, and English listeners exposed to ‘The Little Prince Story’). A corollary of the expected distribution of ISC results across the brain is that we expect that the pattern of these shared responses⁵ will be similar across the three sub-audiences of French, Chinese, and English listeners (H1b). Put differently, we predict that the regions exhibiting high, medium, and low ISC should be the same across the independent ISC analyses for each audience. Therefore, H1b predicts a strong, significant correlation of the ISC pattern across the audience groups of French, Chinese, and English listeners.

In addition to predicting shared responses within each language group, we ask whether the brain response to the story will exhibit similarities across groups of people who process the same story told in a different language. Based on the above discussion, this should be the case – and particularly for regions located post-perception along the sensation-to-cognition continuum (H2: ISC across languages). Specifically, if brain responses to stories occur along the sensation-to-cognition continuum and shared neural responses (indexed by ISC) are contingent on whether the incoming stimulus content meets ‘matching’ knowledge structures⁶ that are shared between listeners’ brains, then we can expect ISC especially in regions that are located at postperceptual levels of the sensation-to-cognition continuum. Therefore, regions involved in integrating and making sense of higher-level story information should show commonalities in their neural responses, and these should occur among listeners of a given language version of the story and also across people exposed to the same story in different languages.

Overall, the main rationale of this study is that there should be a global, common, and temporally aligned neural response to the same story. In other words, regardless of the specific language in which a story is delivered to the brains of listeners, higher-level regions of their brains should exhibit similar processes because they do not simply respond to the auditory input (which indeed differs across languages), but receive a pre-transformed version of the story, one that is somewhat abstracted from the concrete acoustic input into a neural pattern or signature that we expect to be similar across listeners – regardless of the specific language they can speak and thus listened to. In particular, higher-level brain regions like the precuneus, which are not responding to the physical input’s immediate sensoryphysical properties, but rather to an internally transformed version of the input (as sense is made and meaning has been extracted from the sounds), should exhibit some common responses over time – regardless of the input language. Conversely, finding such across-language brain activity correlations despite the different auditory input would provide strong evidence that intersubjectively correlated brain responses are sensitive to higher-level story processes, thereby underscoring their relevance as a theoretical tool to study reception processes.

Alignment of Brain Responses Within Each Language Group (H1)

Having demonstrated that the audiobook evoked the expected brain activity, we next moved on to the first main analysis: To address H1, we computed ISC analyses within each group of French, Chinese, and English listeners, respectively. Consistent with previous studies, the results confirmed that many regions exhibited similar neural time courses across listeners. As shown in Figure 3, listening to the story in each language prompted strongly correlated neural responses in early auditory areas (e.g., Heschl’s gyrus, primary auditory cortex), linguistic (e.g., perisylvian language regions), and extralinguistic regions (e.g., medial and lateral frontal cortex, anterior and posterior cingulate cortex, precuneus) – and this was the case regardless of whether the story was presented in French, Chinese, or English. Moreover, the spatial distribution and strength of these shared responses confirmed predicted patterns, i.e., strong ISC in auditory/early language regions (MTG, STG) and weaker, but still significant ISC in higher-level regions.

Figure 3.

Collective alignment of brain activity among members of each language group (Within-Language-ISC)Note. Correlating brain activity time courses among all participants exposed to the same audiobook (i.e. within each language community) reveals significantly aligned processing in widespread brain regions, including early auditory regions (primary auditory cortex, BA41/52), linguistic areas (including STG, angular gyrus, and IFG), and extralinguistic regions (including precuneus, medial and dorsolateral cortex, and prefrontal cortex). Results are significant and corrected for multiple comparisons using the phase-randomization and FDR procedures (see Supplement for additional statistics). The scatterplots to the right demonstrate that the pattern of inter-brain alignment is highly similar (p < .001) across the three independent analysis streams, demonstrating that the same regions are either strongly, moderately, or weakly aligned. Note that the sagittal brain sections represent the average across pairwise ISC across all nine sections, which have also been additionally thresholded at r = .05 for better illustration. See text for further details and Supplementary Results for the ISC maps corresponding to each of the nine subsections. (DLPFC - Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex, DMPFC - Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex, IFG - Inferior Frontal Gyrus, ATL - Anterior Temporal Lobe, A1+ - Extended Early Auditory Cortex, PCC - Posterior Cingulate Cortex).

Figure 3 also shows that the spatial distribution of ISC results for the three different language groups was highly similar. This was statistically confirmed by highly significant correlations of the ISC result patterns across the 293 brain regions: Specifically, the ISC results for French and Chinese listeners were correlated at r = 0.93, French and English listeners’ ISC results correlated r = 0.95, and r = 0.94 for Chinese- English results (all p’s < .001). These results support H1b.

Furthermore, these effects were not just present in the overall results, but also within each of the nine subsections – thus demonstrating very high consistency (See Supplementary Results). Moreover, in addition to computing these ISC analyses on the original subsections, we also ran the same set of analyses for the resampled data (i.e. the data that had been stretched or compressed to make them equally long across language groups). As expected, we find that the pattern of ISC results matches the one reported for the original data (see Supplementary Results).

Exposing Aligned Neural Responses to the Same Story Told in Different Languages (H2)

Next, we tested whether the same story, even when told in different languages, would evoke similar responses across listeners, especially in higher-level, post-perceptual brain regions such as the precuneus (H2). To this end, we first began exploring the data from section 4, as this was the version of the book that naturally had almost the same length. As shown in Figure 4, examining data from the precuneus via split-half and groupaveraging, we find evidence that a shared signal emerges even across the brains of listeners exposed to different-language versions of the same story.

Figure 4.

Aligned Neural Processes Across Language GroupsNote. Top panels: Each group’s fMRI data were averaged across half of the group (for visualization purposes only), and correlations were assessed within and across groups. Bottom Panels: A shared response across groups is visible once data are averaged across all participants who were exposed to each version of the book. Due to different group sizes, the signal-to-noise ratio differs, and data were z-scored individually and for visualization on a common timeline. Note that the data for section #4 of the audiobook required almost no resampling, as the different language versions were already of the same length.

The results from this analysis suggest a common signal, but they use averaging to boost the signalto- noise ratio and thus optimize the conditions for detecting (and visualizing) it. Thus, to test our hypothesis also for all sections, all regions of the brain, and at the level of single listeners, we performed a pairwise ISC analysis across the combined dataset consisting of brain responses from 110 listeners (27 French, 33 Chinese, and 50 English). Specifically, we collapse the within- and across-language ISC from the ISCresult matrices (see Supplementary Methods for details)⁷. Moreover, to gauge the degree to which random time series could yield spurious positive across-language ISC results, we performed the phase-shift ISC analysis with 500 permutations to generate a null distribution (see Methods section).

The results, shown in Figure 5, reveal acrosslanguage ISC, thereby supporting H2. Specifically, we find that as French, Chinese, and English listeners listen to the French, Chinese, or English version of the same story, their brain activity in the precuneus exhibits similar responses over time. Of note, the across-language ISC in the precuneus is clearly weaker than the within-language ISC, but it is still present and can be made visible via group averaging. As can be seen from Figure 5, significant across-language ISC is also present in other regions, such as the anterior and middle temporal lobes, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and the temporo-parietal junction. Many of these regions are part of the default mode network, which is involved in higher-level processes, and thus, these results are also consistent with H2.

Figure 5.

Aligned Processes Across Language GroupsNote. Top panel: Illustration of the analysis stream that splits up pairwise ISC data into within-language and acrosslanguage comparisons and compared with a surrogate distribution. Middle left panel: Scatterplot comparing the strength of ISC for the within and across-language comparison. As can be seen, the within-language comparison is stronger (all values below the diagonal), but the across-language results are also positive for some regions. Middle right panel: Results for one selected region, the precuneus. Bottom left panel: ISC within languages plotted on brains (compare Figure 3). Bottom right panel: ISC across languages (Results are statistically significant and additionally thresholded at r = 0.04 to show only stronger ISC).

However, the across-language ISC for auditory regions (see Figure 5) was unexpected and thus was followed up on in a series of control analyses (see Supplementary Materials and Results). Also, we note that there was also some evidence of differential coupling between sub-audiences and variability over the course of the story. Specifically, not all nine sections exhibited across-language ISC, and we conducted follow-up analyses to examine this issue in greater detail. It appears that those sections in which the French, Chinese, and English versions had a comparable length showed higher ISC, which raises some questions about the resampling and alignment for the across-language analysis in those runs that differed in length (see Figure 6 & Supplementary).

Figure 6.

Aligned Processes Within Across Language Groups for All Nine SectionsNote. The scatterplots show the ISC for all 293 studied brain regions, with the x-axis representing the within-language ISC and the y-axis the across-language ISC. As can be seen, the within-language ISC is far stronger, but there is also evidence that for some regions, across-language ISC emerges in the same regions. The inserted brain-plots show significant within-language ISC (tested via a 500-fold phase-scrambling distribution) and across-language brain plots are shown for the sections where they survived statistical corrections.

Story-Induced Neural Alignment Within and Across Language-Specific Audiences

The strong temporal alignment between the brains of listeners who were exposed to a given story told in their respective language (i.e. ISC_{English-English}, ISC_{French-French}, and ISC_{Chinese-Chinese}, or simply ISC_{within-language}) supports H1. The strength and regional distribution of within-language ISC also followed the expected pattern (H1a), being strongest in auditory and lower-level language regions, but still significant in areas of the default mode, saliency and executive networks. Moreover, the similarity of these regional ISC patterns confirms H1b.

The most interesting result of this study relates to the across-language ISC, which supports H2. This ISC_{across-language} indicates temporal similarities of brain responses among participants who listened to different-language versions of the same story. These results are compatible with the idea that the precuneus, as well as default-mode regions more broadly, are involved in integrating higher-level information over extended time scales and supramodal, and extralinguistic information (Chang et al., 2022).

These results also provide a conceptual replication and extension of earlier results by Honey and colleagues (Honey et al., 2012). Specifically, these researchers presented direct translations of the same story to English and Russian listeners. The current study further expands the range of languages studied (adding French and Chinese, a language from a very different language family), and it also extends the findings to a different story and a larger sample.

Theoretical Implications for Communication Neuroscience

These findings hold broader significance as they contribute to a neurally plausible understanding of communication as discussed in the extended neurocognitive network model (Schmälzle et al., 2022), or by Gasiorek and Aune (2019) with regard to aligned conceptual systems. Although definitions of communication vary, a unifying element is the notion that ideas are conveyed and lead to shared information, which is also reflected in the Latin origin of the word ‘communis’ (meaning ‘shared’; Gleick, 2011; Hasson et al., 2012; Littlejohn & Foss, 2009; Schmälzle & Grall, 2020a). For example, the story medium enables the preservation and transmission of the author’s original thoughts to a large audience that is distant in space and time. From the perspective of the input (story content) and the output (media effects, narrative impact), we have ample evidence that such communication is possible. However, a significant explanatory gap remains regarding the underlying neural mechanisms by which this is achieved. Although more and more communication scholars are embracing a communication neuroscience approach (Coronel et al., 2021; Floyd & Weber, 2020; Hopp et al., 2023; Huskey et al., 2020; Kang et al., 2018; Turner et al., 2019), it is fair to say that most of the field’s theories still rely on hypothetical constructs that lack a neurocognitive and thus mechanistic explanation of how communication can occur.

The picture that emerges from this study is thus one in which the temporally aligned brain responses (i.e., ISC) indicate that the story has been successfully transmitted into the listeners’ brains (Zadbood et al., 2017). More specifically, this transmission involves many substages along the sensation-to-cognition continuum – from the successful transmission of acoustic information to the ear, the perceptual analysis of the sound (Wilson et al., 2008), various linguistic mechanisms related to word and sentence decoding (Brennan et al., 2012), and ultimately the comprehension of complex ideas (e.g., ‘stimulating meaning in the mind’; Beatty et al., 2009; or ‘understanding’; Gasiorek & Aune, 2019; Nguyen et al., 2019; Schmälzle et al., 2015). Although we admit that there are still many questions about how people comprehend, cognitively interpret, and are emotional affected by this particular story about the fictional little prince character (e.g., Thye et al., 2023), the current findings support the following: Coordinated and similar brain activity across different individuals offers neural evidence that communication, or at least elemental forms of it, has taken place. Noninvasive neuroimaging allows us to monitor brain responses during ongoing story reception across multiple regions (e.g., early auditory areas, language-processing regions, extralinguistic areas) without interruption. By utilizing the ISC approach to uncover how different brains align in response to shared content, we gain a powerful method for studying how messages are received on a collective level.

For example, if the auditory cortex of 99 listeners responds very similarly to the same spoken story, but another individual shows uncorrelated responses, then this suggests that this person did not hear the sounds and is functionally deaf. The same reasoning can be applied beyond auditory neurocognition to higher-level knowledge representations, such as shared linguistic knowledge. For instance, if a French listener heard the ‘Le Petit Prince’ story and a person from the United States heard the same story (i.e., the French version), then high ISC in language-related regions would emerge if the US listener had knowledge of the French language, but no ISC should emerge if the information transmission were blocked due to a lack of French knowledge. In fact, this is precisely the study design of Honey et al. (2012), which we were not able to test here because the French, Chinese, and English stories were only played to listeners of the same language. These thought experiments are intriguing, but their outcomes are predictable from the current understanding of brain systems for sound and language processing.

However, moving beyond acoustic or languagespecific knowledge structures, the presence of a cross-language ISC suggests that the shared story content induces convergent brain responses across participants and beyond language barriers. This points to regularities of information processing principles across brains. What are these shared processes about? Mounting evidence suggests that terms like ‘sense-making’, which have long been part of the discipline’s repertoire (Littlejohn & Foss, 2009), may provide adequate descriptions (Yeshurun et al., 2021), albeit it is difficult to put a single verbal label on the information transformations that regions like the precuneus are executing. However, research suggests that these processes operate over multiand supramodal inputs (Fuster, 2003; Mesulam, 1998), as well as over longer time scales (Hasson et al., 2015; Lerner et al., 2011); theoretical, modeling, and experimental work suggests a similar picture (Chang et al., 2022; Hasson et al., 2015; Kumar et al., 2023).

From a neurocognitive perspective, it is also interesting to point out the compatibility between the current results and work on artificial neural networks, such as the paralleldistributed processing (PDP) theory that formed the foundation for the current AI revolution (Mitchell, 2019; Wolfram, 2023). In particular, work flowing from a PDP perspective has long suggested that words and language serve as ‘pointers to knowledge’ (Hinton, 1984; Hinton & Shallice, 1991; McClelland & Rogers, 2003). This is also compatible with the use of word embeddings in natural language processing (Rong, 2014), which are in turn related to psychological approaches to measure meaning (Osgood et al., 1957). Moreover, recent work in multilingual machine translation suggests ideas like ‘hidden state vectors’, which represent meaning in forms that are not bound to a specific language but could be more universally shared. Although speculative, it seems quite plausible that the shared brain patterns across the brains of listeners from different continents are related to such a concept (Chen et al., 2017), and this would also make much sense from an evolutionary perspective (Hasson et al., 2020).

Current work in neurolinguistics, which uses advanced artificial language models (e.g., GPT) is obviously also relevant here. Compared to the current work, which is centrally about the notion of temporal alignment between the brains of different listeners, such work tends to take a different approach though: Specifically, using content-annotations provided by the language model (i.e., feature vectors), it is possible to see if those annotation predict brain activity data, much like we did with the RMSE feature, but now for more abstracted representations from the LLM. This approach can provide deeper insights into the likely representations and transformations that are carried out within specific regions. (Brennan, 2022; Hale et al., 2021; Thye et al., 2023). In sum, we view the inter-subject correlation approach taken here and the approach of languagemodel- based annotations of the stimulus as complementary. The latter has the benefit of providing more insight into content properties although it still grapples with quantifying more abstract pragmatic and semantic variables that likely matter for social cognition and story comprehension (but see Thye et al., 2023). Given the breathtaking advances in artificial language models, however, we expect rapid progress in this direction.

Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research

Although the ‘Le Petit Prince’ story is a rich and extremely popular story, it is only one single story. In addition to the need for a broader variety of story stimuli across contents and genres, one could also hope for a broader variety of languages. The current approach to scan brain activity to the same story told in three different languages is already an advancement over mono- and bilingual studies. However, given the fact that the LPP story has been translated into 382 languages, we currently have only about 1% of ‘coverage.’

One methodological issue that seems worth pointing out specifically is differences in length. For instance, the English story was almost always slightly shorter than the Chinese and French versions. This is relevant insofar as the ISC analysis requires that data be aligned to a common timeline. We overcame this problem by resampling all datasets to a common length. Conceptually, this amounts to stretching or compressing the data, which is supported by prior work but still comes with some caveats (Lerner et al., 2014). This approach is straightforward, but it assumes that the linear time transformation is appropriate. However, given what we know about language, this assumption may be problematic. Based on our own translation and data checks, we confirmed that the basic progression of the story’s event descriptions is coarsely aligned across languages (e.g., each of the nine segments started and ended with the same sentence, suggesting that although the resampling may not be accurate at the millisecond level, it is at least coarsely aligned with a +/- 5 second window, which is close to the resolution of fMRI and the even slower behavior of, e.g., the precuneus (Lerner et al., 2014; Stephens et al., 2013). Still, it will be interesting to improve on the ways in which the story text is time-aligned across languages and incorporate such refined alignment in the analysis of neuroimaging data. Although this is somewhat outside of the scope of communication and falls more under the purview of neurolinguistics, it would help resolve the neurocognitive computations beyond the fairly coarse-grained differentiation in sensory, perceptual-linguistic, and higher-level/extra-linguistic response systems.

Finally, it will be crucial to experimentally unpack the functional significance of the crosslanguage similarities observed in this study. Although this analysis offers intriguing insights, it remains secondary, and the data available for interpretation was limited to comprehension scores, which likely suffered from a ceiling effect. To fully understand the implications of these findings, future research must delve deeper into the relationships between brain responses and interpretations across different cultures (e.g. Momenian et al., 2024). This could involve directly comparing how individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds interpret the same stimuli or story. Such comparisons could reveal not only the shared neural processes that facilitate common interpretations but also the cultural nuances that lead to divergent understandings. For instance, exploring the specific aspects of a narrative or message that different cultures tend to agree or disagree upon could shed light on the cognitive mechanisms that underlie these cross-cultural similarities and differences. Are there particular themes, emotional responses, or moral conclusions that resonate universally, or do cultural frameworks significantly shape how stories are perceived and internalized? To answer these questions, experimental designs could include stimuli that are culturally neutral, alongside those that are culturally loaded, to observe how brain responses vary in each context (e.g. Hopp et al., 2023; Schmälzle et al., 2024).

Summary and Conclusion

In summary, the same story elicited temporally aligned neural processes across listeners. When hearing the story in their native language, listeners’ brains demonstrated the anticipated spatiotemporal alignment. Remarkably, we also observed this alignment across the brains of listeners processing different-language versions of the same story. These findings directly address a core question in communication: the neural mechanisms that enable stories to be transmitted and understood across different brains, regardless of language.