Pragmatics Electrified

Abstract

Chapter to be included in Grimaldi, M., Y. Shtyrov & E. Brattico, (eds.), "Language Electrified. Techniques, Methods, Applications, and Future Perspectives in the Neurophysiological Investigation of Language", Springer. It reviews EEG studies in the pragmatic domain, focusing on non-literal language, discourse and conversation.

Linguistic signs in action: The neuropragmatics of speech acts

“…These processes have long been researched in philosophy and linguistics, but only in recent decades has it become a field of research in neuroscience known as “Neuropragmatics” ( Bambini et al, 2011 , Bara et al, 1997 , Cutica et al, 2006 , Gambi et al, 2015 , Hagoort and Levinson, 2014 , Levinson, 2016 , Noveck, 2018 , Sauerland and Schumacher, 2016 , Soroker et al, 2005 ). Substantial linguistic and neurocognitive research has focused on cases where pragmatic processing is most pronounced, that is, in non-literal meanings, including indirect speech, metaphors, irony and humour ( Bambini et al, 2011 , Bambini et al, 2019 , Boux et al, 2022 , Canal and Bambini, 2020 , Coulson, 2008 , Eviatar and Just, 2006 ), on the study of Gricean conversational implicatures ( Benz and Gotzner, 2021 , Degen and Tanenhaus, 2011 , Feng et al, 2021 , Gotzner et al, 2018 , Hartshorne et al, 2015 , Noveck and Posada, 2003 , Zhan et al, 2017 ) or addressing social and pragmatic deficits in various clinical populations ( Bambini et al, 2022 , Baron-Cohen, 1988 , Carotenuto et al, 2018 , Deliens et al, 2018 , Holtgraves and Giordano, 2017 , Soroker et al, 2005 ). Further research has focused on the organisation and structure of conversations, which have yielded important insights on how human social interactions are organised in sequences (e.g., Kendrick et al, 2020 , Levinson, 2013 , Schegloff, 2007 ), where linguistic signs (words and sentences along with non-verbal communication, such as gestures) are used as a tool of communication to carry out linguistic actions, the so-called speech acts.…”

Different Neural Responses for Unfinished Sentence as a Conventional Indirect Refusal Between Native and Non-native Speakers: An Event-Related Potential Study

“…A variety of pragmatic realizations is known to induce another popular ERP component of negativity, N400, peaking at around 400 ms after stimulus onset. Although the N400 has traditionally been assumed to be an index of various kinds of semantic/pragmatic integration, such as inferring non-literal meanings ( Pynte et al, 1996 ), retrieving conceptual information from context (see Canal and Bambini (2021) for a review), and irony comprehension ( Katz et al, 2004 ), a recent parsimonious hypothesis of single-stream account for language processing suggests that the N400 reflects the retrieval of lexical information from memory, while the P600 relates to semantic/pragmatic processing instead ( Brouwer et al, 2012 ). We should also notice that a robust N400 effect can be observed not only with visual stimuli, but also with auditory stimuli.…”