The newborn brain is sensitive to the communicative function of language

Forgács, Bálint; Tauzin, Tibor; Gergely, György; Gervain, Judit

doi:10.1038/s41598-022-05122-0

Cited by 36 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 29 publications

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“…The social N400 appears to have two constituents: the false belief N400 and the social presence N400 (Forgács et al, 2022b). When presented with congruent and incongruent object-labeling events, adults showed an enhanced N400 response not only to incongruity but also to the mere presence of another person, in contrast to when they were alone.…”

Section: 4mentioning

confidence: 95%

Meaning as mentalization

Forgács

2024

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in developmental science as well. The relation between linguistic form and content has been loosened up in recent pragmatic approaches to communication, showing that code-based models of language comprehension must be augmented by context-sensitive, pragmatic-inferential mechanisms to recover the speaker’s intended meaning. Language acquisition has traditionally been thought to involve building a mental lexicon and extracting syntactic rules from noisy linguistic input, while communicative-pragmatic inferences have also been argued to be indispensable. Recent research findings exploring the electrophysiological indicator of semantic processing, the N400, have raised serious questions about the traditional separation between semantic decoding and pragmatic inferential processes. The N400 appears to be sensitive to mentalization—the ability to attribute beliefs to social partners—already from its developmental onset. This finding raises the possibility that mentalization may not simply contribute to pragmatic inferences that enrich linguistic decoding processes but that the semantic system may be functioning in a fundamentally mentalistic manner. The present review first summarizes the key contributions of pragmatic models of communication to language comprehension. Then, it provides an overview of how communicative intentions are interpreted in developmental theories of communication, with a special emphasis on mentalization. Next, it discusses the sensitivity of infants to the information-transmitting potential of language, their ability to pick up its code-like features, and their capacity to track language comprehension of social partners using mentalization. In conclusion, I argue that the recovery of meaning during linguistic communication is not adequately modeled as a process of code-based semantic retrieval complemented by pragmatic inferences. Instead, the semantic system may establish meaning, as intended, during language comprehension and acquisition through mentalistic attribution of content to communicative partners.

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Section: 4mentioning

confidence: 95%

Meaning as mentalization

Forgács

2024

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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The developmental cognitive mechanism of learning algebraic rules from the dual‐process theory perspective

Xiao,

Liang,

Sun

et al. 2024

PsyCh Journal

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Rule learning is an important ability that enables human beings to adapt to nature and develop civilizations. There have been many discussions on the mechanism and characteristics of algebraic rule learning, but there are still controversies due to the lack of theoretical guidance. Based on the dual‐process theory, this study discussed the following arguments for algebraic rule learning across human and animal studies: whether algebraic rule learning is simply Type 1 processing, whether algebraic rule learning is a domain‐general ability, whether algebraic rule learning is shared by humans and animals, and whether an algebraic rule is learned consciously. Moreover, we propose that algebraic rule learning is possibly a cognitive process that combines both Type 1 and Type 2 processing. Further exploration is required to establish the essence and neural basis of algebraic rule learning.

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