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...

Part I Pioneering Approaches 2 Changing Ideas about Reference 25 Herbert H. Clark and Adrian Bangerter 3 Psycholinguistic Experiments and Linguistic-Pragmatics 50 Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. 4 On the Automaticity of Pragmatic Processes: a Modular Proposal 72 Sam Glucksberg 5 Reasoning, Judgement and Pragmatics 94 Guy Politzer 6 Exploring Quantifiers: Pragmatics Meets the Psychology of Comprehension 1...

Research on language comprehension using event-related potentials (ERPs) reported distinct ERP components reliably related to the processing of semantic (N400) and syntactic information (P600). Recent ERP studies have challenged this well-defined distinction by showing P600 effects for semantic and pragmatic anomalies. So far, it is still unresolved whether the P600 reflects specific or rather ...

Although frequent in our everyday conversations, irony is a complex pragmatic phenomenon involving specific linguistic, communicative and cognitive abilities in order to be fully understood. In this study we examined the pragmatic comprehension of ironical and non ironical language by analysing event-related potentials (ERPs) of irony decoding process. We asked 12 subjects to listen to 240 sent...

This paper examines the role of syntactic constraints on the reactivation and assignment of antecedents to explicit and implicit anaphoric elements during sentence comprehension. Evidence from on-line studies examining the time course of coreference processing supports the view that reactivation of potential antecedents is restricted by grammatical constraints when they are available. When stru...

Previous studies have shown that brain regions for mentalizing, including temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), are activated in understanding the nonliteral meaning of sentences. A different set of brain regions, including left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), is activated for dealing with pragmatic incongruence. Here we demonstrate that individuals' cognitive empath...