Abstract
The National Institute of Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) Initiative “calls for the development of new ways of classifying psychopathology based on dimensions of observable behavior.” As a result of this ambitious initiative, language has been identified as an independent construct in the RDoC matrix. In this article, we frame language within an evolutionary and neuropsychological context and discuss some of the limitations to the current measurements of language. Findings from genomics and the neuroimaging of performance during language tasks are discussed in relation to serious mental illness and within the context of caveats regarding measuring language. Indeed, the data collection and analysis methods employed to assay language have been both aided and constrained by the available technologies, methodologies, and conceptual definitions. Consequently, different fields of language research show inconsistent definitions of language that have become increasingly broad over time. Individually, they have also shown significant improvements in conceptual resolution, as well as in experimental and analytic techniques. More recently, language research has embraced collaborations across disciplines, notably neuroscience, cognitive science, and computational linguistics and has ultimately re‐defined classical ideas of language. As we move forward, the new models of language with their remarkably multifaceted constructs force a re‐examination of the NIMH RDoC conceptualization of language and thus the neuroscience and genetics underlying this concept. © 2016 The Authors. American Journal of Medical Genetics Part B: Neuropsychiatric Genetics Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Highlights
The National Institute of Mental Health’s Research Domain Criteria ( RDoC) Initiative “calls for the development of new ways of classifying psychopathology based on dimensions of observable behavior” [Insel et al, 2010]
Such a re-definition necessarily must be drawn from the linguistic, speech, cognitive, and affective sciences, spanning basic articulatory processes to those involved in complicated social interactions, and will open more profitable avenues of research in genomics and neuroscience
The RDoC notion of language has its origin in a reductionist framework, and this begs the question as to the purpose that speech and language evolved to fulfil
Summary
An Examination of the Language Construct in NIMH’s Research Domain Criteria: Time for Reconceptualization!. The National Institute of Mental Health’s Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) Initiative “calls for the development of new ways of classifying psychopathology based on dimensions of observable behavior.”. Different fields of language research show inconsistent definitions of language that have become increasingly broad over time. They have shown significant improvements in conceptual resolution, as well as in experimental and analytic techniques. As we move forward, the new models of language with their remarkably multifaceted constructs force a re-examination of the NIMH RDoC conceptualization of language and the neuroscience and genetics underlying this concept.
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