COMMUNICATION AND NEUROPRAGMATICS
Stampa
Anno immatricolazione
2020/2021
Anno offerta
2020/2021
Normativa
DM270
SSD
L-LIN/01 (GLOTTOLOGIA E LINGUISTICA)
Dipartimento
DIPARTIMENTO DI SCIENZE DEL SISTEMA NERVOSO E DEL COMPORTAMENTO
Corso di studio
PSYCHOLOGY, NEUROSCIENCE AND HUMAN SCIENCES
Curriculum
PERCORSO COMUNE
Anno di corso
Periodo didattico
Secondo Semestre (15/02/2021 - 11/06/2021)
Crediti
6
Ore
36 ore di attività frontale
Lingua insegnamento
INGLESE
Tipo esame
SCRITTO E ORALE CONGIUNTI
Docente
BAMBINI VALENTINA (titolare) - 6 CFU
Prerequisiti
No specific requirements.
Obiettivi formativi
The course aims at offering knowledge in the field of psycho- and neurolinguistic studies applied to the pragmatic aspects of the communicative competence. Specifically, the course aims at offering knowledge about the processes at stake in human communication, their neural basis and their disruption in pathological conditions. The course is targeted for students with specific interests in psychology and cognitive neuroscience of language, as well as for students who wish to acquire greater awareness of the role of communicative competence in relation to other cognitive functions.
After completing this course, the student will be able to:
- recognize the main pragmatic processes, such as conversational rules and inferring of implicit meanings;
- describe the cognitive architecture of pragmatics, especially the relation with the faculty of language and with theory of mind;
- know the neural correlates of pragmatic processes, as they emerge from neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies;
- know the main symptoms of pragmatic language disorder and the most affected conditions;
- be familiar with the main experimental tasks and neuropsychological tests to assess pragmatic competence.
Programma e contenuti
The course combines notions in linguistics, psychology and cognitive neuroscience, with special attention to the emerging fields of experimental pragmatics, clinical pragmatics and neuropragmatics.
Part of the lessons will be devoted to explain what pragmatic competence means, presenting it with respect to the other language components. Special attention will be paid to the description of the inferential processes that support the understanding of metaphors, irony and other non-literal expressions.
The core part of the course will deal with the neural correlates of pragmatic competence, describing research with neuroimaging and electrophysiological methods. We will discuss the main brain regions and networks elicited by pragmatic tasks and how the electrophysiological response unfolds during the comprehension of discourse and non-literal meanings.
The last part of the course will focus on pragmatic language disorder, describing the communicative difficulties that might occur in schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorder and various neurological conditions. The course will describe the main symptoms of pragmatic language disorder, such as concretism and off-topic speech, as well as the available assessment tools. Finally, the relation between pragmatics and other cognitive components, such as theory of mind and executive functions, will be discussed.
Metodi didattici
Lectures, group discussion, and exercises.
Testi di riferimento
• Bambini V., B. Bara (2012) Neuropragmatics. In: Östman J-O., Verschueren J. Handbook of Pragmatics, Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1-22.
• Cummings, L. (2017) ‘Clinical pragmatics’, in G. Yueguo, A. Barron and G. Steen (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics, London and New York: Routledge, 419-432.
• Grice, P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds), Syntax & Semantics 3: Speech Acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press.
• Hagoort, P., & Levinson, S. C. (2014). Neuropragmatics. In Gazzaniga, M. S. & Mangun, G. R. (Eds.), The cognitive neurosciences (5th ed., pp. 667-674). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
• Van Berkum, J. J. A. (2009). The neuropragmatics of 'simple' utterance comprehension: An ERP review. In U. Sauerland, & K. Yatsushiro (Eds.), Semantics and pragmatics: From experiment to theory (pp. 276-316). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Further material will be presented during the class.
Modalità verifica apprendimento
Written and oral exams
Altre informazioni
Obiettivi Agenda 2030 per lo sviluppo sostenibile