A Pragmatic Oscillome: Aligning Visual Attentional Mechanisms with Language Comprehension

A Pragmatic Oscillome: Aligning Visual Attentional Mechanisms with Language Comprehension

A growing body of work over the last decade has investigated the potential functional role of neural oscillations in language comprehension I will explore how a number of recent developments in the field, and related domains of systems neuroscience, can generate much-needed linking hypotheses between the language sciences and neuroscience. To this end, I will focus on an area of linguistics who...

Electrophysiology and Pragmatic Language Comprehension

Aligning Linguistic and Brain Views on Language Comprehension

Neural correlates of pragmatic language comprehension in autism spectrum disorders.

Difficulties with pragmatic aspects of communication are universal across individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Here we focused on an aspect of pragmatic language comprehension that is relevant to social interaction in daily life: the integration of speaker characteristics inferred from the voice with the content of a message. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we ...

Visual Attention during Spatial Language Comprehension

Spatial terms such as "above", "in front of", and "on the left of" are all essential for describing the location of one object relative to another object in everyday communication. Apprehending such spatial relations involves relating linguistic to object representations by means of attention. This requires at least one attentional shift, and models such as the Attentional Vector Sum (AVS) pred...