COMMUNICATION AND NEUROPRAGMATICS
Stampa
Enrollment year
2020/2021
Academic year
2020/2021
Regulations
DM270
Academic discipline
L-LIN/01 (GLOTTOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS)
Department
DEPARTMENT OF BRAIN AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Course
PSYCHOLOGY, NEUROSCIENCE AND HUMAN SCIENCES
Curriculum
PERCORSO COMUNE
Year of study
Period
2nd semester (15/02/2021 - 11/06/2021)
ECTS
6
Lesson hours
36 lesson hours
Language
English
Activity type
WRITTEN AND ORAL TEST
Teacher
BAMBINI VALENTINA (titolare) - 6 ECTS
Prerequisites
No specific requirements.
Learning outcomes
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.
Course contents
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.
Teaching methods
Lectures, group discussion, and exercises.
Reccomended or required readings
• 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.
Assessment methods
Written and oral exams
Further information
Sustainable development goals - Agenda 2030