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.
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.
- Docente: VALENTINA BAMBINI