The meaning-making mechanism(s) behind the eyes and between the ears

Abstract

In this contribution, the following four questions are discussed: (i) where is meaning?; (ii) what is meaning?; (iii) what is the meaning of mechanism?; (iv) what are the mechanisms of meaning? I will argue that meanings are in the head. Meanings have multiple facets, but minimally one needs to make a distinction between single word meanings (lexical meaning) and the meanings of multi-word utterances. The latter ones cannot be retrieved from memory, but need to be constructed on the fly. A mechanistic account of the meaning-making mind requires an analysis at both a functional and a neural level, the reason being that these levels are causally interdependent. I will show that an analysis exclusively focusing on patterns of brain activation lacks explanatory power. Finally, I shall present an initial sketch of how the dynamic interaction between temporo-parietal areas and inferior frontal cortex might instantiate the interpretation of linguistic utterances in the context of a multimodal setting and ongoing discourse information. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Towards mechanistic models of meaning composition’

Lexical frequency and sentence context influence the brain’s response to single words

“…Given the association between MTG activity and lexical-semantic processing (Friederici, 2012;Hagoort, 2017), the effect in MTG could reflect the build-up of richer semantic representations as sentences progress, more so than during the progression of word-lists. The absence of an effect of index in word-lists in the angular gyrus may be consistent with the view that this region is a hub to integrate different types of information extracted by various parts of the language network (Binder & Desai, 2011;Hagoort, 2003Hagoort, , 2019. In contrast to unfolding well-formed sentences, word-lists lack syntactic structure, and therefore do not permit for a meaningful integration of structural cues with, for instance, lexico-semantic information.…”

Hyperscanning EEG and Classification Based on Riemannian Geometry for Festive and Violent Mental State Discrimination

“…The terms "festive" and "violent" can be understood differently depending on the context and interpretational meaning. The debate on whether and how linguistic data are a part of a complex interpretational structure and how they can be implemented in the mind of the participants remain largely unknown (Hagoort, 2020;Martin and Baggio, 2020). In this perspective, we propose a protocol inspired by Gregory Bateson's analysis of double framing (Bateson, 1955).…”

A Cognitive Linguistics Study of the Conceptual Derivation of Word Meaning

“…Cognitive linguistics theory is now definitely able to find its way on the basis of cognitive terms. It became possible to concentrate on the basic features of the vocabulary, allowing to show its nature and relationship from a cognitive and communicative point of view Hagoort (2019) found that meanings have multiple sides; However, one needs to make a separation between the meanings of a single word (the lexical meaning) and the meanings of a multi-word pronunciation. Polyphonic words cannot be retrieved from memory but must be constructed quickly.…”