The neural integration of speaker and message.
Publication year
2008Source
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20, 4, (2008), pp. 580-91ISSN
Publication type
Article / Letter to editor

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Organization
Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging
PI Group Neurobiology of Language
Psychiatry
Former Organization
F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging
Journal title
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Volume
vol. 20
Issue
iss. 4
Page start
p. 580
Page end
p. 91
Subject
110 000 Neurocognition of Language; 110 003 Autism & depression; 110 007 PLUS: A neurocomputational model for the Processing of Linguistic Utterances based on the Unification-Space architecture; 110 009 The human brain and Chinese prosody; 110 012 Social cognition of verbal communication; 110 013 Binding and the MUC-model; 110 014 Public activities; 110 030 ERC Janzen Spatial memory; DCN 1: Perception and Action; DCN 2: Functional Neurogenomics; UMCN 3.2: Cognitive neurosciences; 110 003 Autism & depressionsAbstract
When do listeners take into account who the speaker is? We asked people to listen to utterances whose content sometimes did not match inferences based on the identity of the speaker (e.g., "If only I looked like Britney Spears" in a male voice, or "I have a large tattoo on my back" spoken with an upper-class accent). Event-related brain responses revealed that the speaker's identity is taken into account as early as 200-300 msec after the beginning of a spoken word, and is processed by the same early interpretation mechanism that constructs sentence meaning based on just the words. This finding is difficult to reconcile with standard "Gricean" models of sentence interpretation in which comprehenders initially compute a local, context-independent meaning for the sentence ("semantics") before working out what it really means given the wider communicative context and the particular speaker ("pragmatics"). Because the observed brain response hinges on voice-based and usually stereotype-dependent inferences about the speaker, it also shows that listeners rapidly classify speakers on the basis of their voices and bring the associated social stereotypes to bear on what is being said. According to our event-related potential results, language comprehension takes very rapid account of the social context, and the construction of meaning based on language alone cannot be separated from the social aspects of language use. The linguistic brain relates the message to the speaker immediately.
This item appears in the following Collection(s)
- Academic publications [227207]
- Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging [3594]
- Electronic publications [108520]
- Faculty of Medical Sciences [86711]
- Open Access publications [77768]
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