Defining the relation between cognitive neuroscience and discourse studies

Abstract EN

In contemporary linguistics, both cognitive and critical approaches to language have been elaborated in some detail.

Unfortunately, the two perspectives have seldom converged, despite the potential theoretical advances such collaboration offers.

Although historically and sociologically understandable, this separation of fields is bound to block progress.

Only a handful of researchers and scholars in literature, music, film, esthetics, and art history have been attempting to follow and engage with developments in cognitive neuroscience.

This represents a lost opportunity for scientists no less than for humanists, as critics and theorists of the arts are uniquely trained to pose questions and adduce examples that could bring more rigor and refinement, as well as cultural resonance, to the new sciences of mind.

This paper explores important and fruitful links betweencognitive neuroscience and discourse.

By adopting a non-reductive approach to literary and other cultural artifacts as records of high-level cognitive functioning evoking complex responses in their audiences, it seeks to contribute towards a more explicit and candid discussion of the methodologies that employ linguistic insights and analysis procedures in order to address cognitive representations and processes.

Particularly, its goal is to eventuate, not in a set of answers, but in a set of pointed and provocative questions for further consideration and research.

The specific research questions addressed in this article are the following : 1) How can cognitive processes be accessed and understood sufficiently to enable reliable models to discourse analysis? 2) What practical problems challenge the design of a good discourse-relevant neuro-imaging study, or to develop a theory of discourse comprehension that takes into account what we know about language, about cognition, and about the brain? Historically, research on language is at the roots of cognitive science.

In the 1970s, relevant psycholinguistic models emerged, including pragmatics and discourse processing theories, which proposed an analysis of language beyond its basic structural facets.

For example, speech acts model, proposed by Searle (1969), and the text organization model, proposed by van Dijk and Kintsch (1978), served as the basis for theories on pragmatics and discourse adopted today.

Although these models could be an important theoretical basis for the assessment of language production and comprehension, language remains a topic scarcely studied by neuropsychologists compared with other cognitive processes.

Discourse analysis is a broad and fast-developing interdisciplinary field concerned with the study of language use in context which emerged between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s in such disciplines as anthropology, ethnography, microsociology, cognitive and social psychology, poetics, rhetoric, stylistics, linguistics, semiotics, and other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (van Dijk, 2000).

Cognitive neuroscience comprises a wide field of investigation, encompassing an array of complementary domains like physiological psychology and neurobiology.

It may be seen as perhaps the most promising and exciting intellectual initiative of the new century.

Cognitive neuroscience is concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes, and addresses questions of how psychological functions are produced by the brain.