Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

Psycholinguistic research of language comprehension tries to relate the abstract linguistic
knowledge to the language behavior of the speaker/listener. In this respect it can benefit
from the outcome of the comprehension processes since it is measurable and liable to
experimental manipulations. However, these manipulations allow only for indirect
inferences about the comprehension processes and provide no direct insight into them.
Neuroscience approach to language comprehension looks for the biological substrate of
language. The research is oriented towards finding the anatomical structures that carry
out linguistic computations and identify the time course of the processes related to
language comprehension.
The emerging interdisciplinary field of cognitive neuroscience encompasses the field of
cognitive and experimental psychology, functional neuroimaging and cognitive science.
When researching language the main goal is to link the cognitive architecture
(represented in the language processing models) with the neural architecture (obtained in
the neuroimaging or electrophysiological studies) and with the computational architecture
or computational models that use artificial neural networks for modeling some aspect of
linguistic behavior. This constitutes the triangle of cognitive neuroscience of language.
The research can be focused on one of its angles or on one of its sides (i.e. on the link
between the neural architecture and computational models, for example).
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