Abstract
A growing body of work over the last decade has investigated the potential functional role of neural oscillations in language comprehension (Giraud and Poeppel, 2012; Doelling and Poeppel, 2015; Lewis and Bastiaansen, 2015; Ding et al., 2016). 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.
Highlights
A growing body of work over the last decade has investigated the potential functional role of neural oscillations in language comprehension (Giraud and Poeppel, 2012; Doelling and Poeppel, 2015; Lewis and Bastiaansen, 2015; Ding et al, 2016)
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 can be implemented via generic, domain-general mechanisms elsewhere argued to be responsible for particular aspects of visual cognition
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 αand β-oscillating regions to form a clocking mechanism which activates sequences of visual representations
Summary
A growing body of work over the last decade has investigated the potential functional role of neural oscillations in language comprehension (Giraud and Poeppel, 2012; Doelling and Poeppel, 2015; Lewis and Bastiaansen, 2015; Ding et al, 2016). 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 featuresets, the principles of a particular theory of pragmatics, Relevance Theory, could be neurobiologically grounded.
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