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The Role of Intention and Goal-Directed Behavior in Language Processing| old_uid | 15742 |
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| title | The Role of Intention and Goal-Directed Behavior in Language Processing |
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| start_date | 2015/06/05 |
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| schedule | 11h45-12h15 |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle B011 |
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| details | Cycle Cognition |
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| summary | According to traditional accounts language was argued to be rather
encapsulated from top-down processes such as attention (e.g., Fodor,
1983). While by now the literature counts on many empirical
demonstrations falsifying such rigid modular stance, the dominant view
in the field still posits that top-down influences are restricted to
late, reactive processes. That is, following the classical dichotomy
between fast automaticity and slow top-down control (e.g., Posner &
Snyder, 1975), initial activation of words is thought to occur without
a moderating influence of the goal-directed behavior at play (e.g.,
Levelt et al., 1999). It is only after the rapid automatic retrieval
of words that the slower top-down processes can aid selection and
decision-making confirm one’s linguistic intentions (e.g., whether to
‘use’ the activated word work as a noun or a verb). Such separation
between language processing proper on the one hand and top-down
processing on the other stands in strong contrast to the much more
dynamical and proactive role attributed to goal-directed control in
other areas of cognition, most notably in vision science (e.g.,
Desimone & Duncan, 1995; Engels et al., 2001). There it has been
documented that the rapid and successful recognition of our
environment relies on the immediate interplay between bottom-up
processes elicited by the stimulus in question and top-down processes
in function of our intentions, a given context and previous
experiences. In this presentation I will demonstrate through a series
of experiments that also language processing, whether it concerns the
construction of meaning during comprehension or the construction of
articulatory plans during production, is subject to dynamical
predictions and proactive top-down influences. This in turn has
important consequences for the architecture underpinning language in
the brain: Rather than a general-purpose, context-invariant
feedforward process of abstract symbols, language has to be perceived
as context-dependent and adaptive to the linguistic intentions and
goals of a speaker and his interlocutor. |
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| responsibles | Bigi |
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