Beyond the language given: The neurobiological infrastructure for pragmatic inferencing

Beyond the language given: The neurobiological infrastructure for pragmatic inferencing
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This is a past event

Even though language allows us to say exactly what we mean, we often use it to express things indirectly, in a way that depends on the specific communicative context. One of the big puzzles in language science is how listeners work out what speakers really mean, a skill central to communication. In this talk, I will present a series of functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) studies focusing on different aspects of indirectness processing. All of these studies compared utterances identical at the sentence level, rendered direct or indirect only by the preceding conversation between two actors. In the first one (Bašnáková, Weber, Petersson, van Berkum, & Hagoort, 2014), we compared indirect replies with face-saving motives (“Did you like my presentation?” “It’s hard to give a good presentation.”), to more neutral, informative indirect replies (the same target answer preceded by “Will you choose a poster or a presentation for the student conference?”) and baseline direct replies (“How difficult is it to give a good presentation?”).  To make the indirect face-saving replies more personally relevant to the participants, we constructed a mock Job interview where the participants acted either as direct addressees or as over-hearers of direct and face-saving indirect replies (Study 2, Bašnáková, van Berkum, Weber, & Hagoort, 2015). To address the fact that communication is not limited to the linguistic code and interlocutors often use signals that are both non-conventional and non-verbal, we also conducted a study on indirect pointing gestures (Bašnáková, Campisi, van Berkum, & Hagoort, in preparation). Here, participants interpreted cartoons where each interaction between two people was concluded by a target reply which was either verbal or gestural and direct or indirect (e.g. “Will you join me for a run?” “My shoe is worn out.”/ Points to a worn-out shoe.).  I will discuss the main findings of these studies in terms of what brain networks, besides the left-lateralized core language regions, underlie language interpretation in the social context. 

Speaker
Dr Jana Basnakova
Hosted by
School of Psychology
Venue
William Guild Building
Contact

Dr Chu or Ms Carolyn Porter