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 whose existence has barely been acknowledged by the oscillation literature—pragmatics—and argue that elementary principles of discourse interpretation (though not more complex, peripheral aspects of pragmatic knowledge) can be implemented via generic, domain-general mechanisms elsewhere argued to be responsible for particular aspects of visual cognition. It will be suggested that these two systems share a number of striking computational/representational properties, and hence may share homologous dynamic and connectomic substrates. Beginning first with the visual system, Jensen et al.'s (2012) approach to the prioritization of salient unattended stimuli claims that neocortical γ rhythms phase-lock to posterior α-and β-oscillating regions to form a clocking mechanism which activates sequences of visual representations. The striate cortex consequently extracts different features from distant regions, aiding the construction of a coherent visual scene. This process ensures that object X in a given scene is interpreted before object Y, imposing general and efficient set-constructing rules. These proposals are in accordance with the broader consensus that α phases modulate neuronal excitability and γ activity. This is a particular manifestation of what we could call " Wallace " s Problem' after David Foster Wallace: How does the brain deal with the sheer mass of sensory overload it receives constantly? [ " What always amazed Wallace about real life was the overload of information, " writes his biographer Max (2013:p. 244)]. I will argue that if similar " oscillomic " (referring to a specific feature of brain dynamics, namely neural oscillations) mechanisms are responsible for the construction of linguistic feature-sets, then the principles of a particular theory of pragmatics, Relevance Theory, could be neurobiologically grounded. Relevance Theory claims that during discourse comprehension particular representations are triggered before others due to their " cognitive relevance " (Sperber and Wilson, 1995). The Communicative Principle of Relevance claims that " Every utterance (and ostensive stimulus more generally) coveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance, " relatedly, the Relevance-Theoretic Comprehension Procedure states that language comprehenders follow a path of least effort in computing cognitive effects (Wilson and Sperber, 2004). Processes involving lexical pragmatics …