Discourse processing and its interface to syntax and semantics

The present project offers groundbreaking neurolinguistic research on how the brain processes discourse coherence relations – an area that has received surprisingly little attention in neurolinguistics, despite its centrality to everyday language use. Coherence plays a major role in both language production (when we plan what to say) and language interpretation (when we interpret and evaluate what is being said). While we know what makes a text coherent, we know very little about how the brain processes coherence relations beyond the clause level. Yet, natural language is of course much more than isolated clauses. In this project, we therefore investigate whether the effects that indicate expectancy and information integration at the clause level are present also across clauses, at the discourse level. To do this, we use the cutting-edge technique EEG (Electroencephalography) in combination with traditional corpus and behavioural methods.

The aim of the project is to find out how discourse expectations are processed in the brain and whether it uses the same mechanisms for processing discourse as it uses for clauses and words. This knowledge is crucial for our understanding of how the brain processes language on all hierarchical levels, and for how language in interaction is processed. These results will be important to researchers in linguistics, cognitive science and computational modelling of language dialogue in AI-systems.