**7. Conclusion**

To summarize, latest emergent literatures suggests a promising trend that researchers in language cognitive neuroscience are growingly attracted to address topic relevant to the neural correlates underlying social language processing. Despite the exciting new contributions in the relationship between neural networks underlying mentalizing/ToM, social inference, executive function, action, cognitive empathy and the understanding of different forms of nonliteral language, speech act, affection-charged literary, and pragmatic forms, it is still at the very beginning to characterize the precise role of prefrontal cortex in language communication in social contexts. More works taking advantage of the latest advancements in neuroimaging, neuropsychological testing, and even neurostimulation (transcranial magnetic/ direct-current stimulation) should be facilitated to enlighten this new line of research in the broad context of neuropragmatics and cognitive neuroscience of human communication.

One future perspective is to examine the functional coupling between prefrontal regions and other parts of the brain that support the social inference via linguistic cues (e.g., vocal cues [100]) and the individual differences that modulate the strength of the functional coupling. Despite growing recent evidence with behavioral measures showing that language communication is deeply grounded in sociocultural conventions [84], few neuroimaging studies have dedicated to how culturally related linguistic and speech cues (e.g., linguistic accent) can contribute to the understanding of the role of the medial prefrontal cortex in perceiving sociocultural groups [100]. Another related question is how the knowledge regarding prefrontal cortex can illuminate the neural underpinnings of the socio-communicative deficits in special populations such as autism and schizophrenia, with a particular interest in the various types of pragmatic and social language processing as the medium for indexing their social interactive ability. These new proposals (with some of them being currently undertaken) will undoubtedly instigate more new endeavors to address the mediating role of prefrontal cortex in the relationship between language and social cognition.
