Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Neuropsychology
of Communication
123
Editor
Michela Balconi
Department of Psychology
Catholic University of Milan
Milan, Italy
This is a revised, enlarged and completely updated version of the Italian Edition published under the title
Neuropsicologia della comunicazione
edited by M. Balconi
© Springer-Verlag Italia 2008
All rights reserved
DOI 10.1007/978-88-470-1584-5
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9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Not nothing
without you
but not the same
Erich Fried (1979)
v
vi Preface
Other aspects, such as the study of mimic and facial expressions, are more advanced,
especially with respect to emotion communication. Another and even more difficult
goal is the integration of different indices of analysis, i.e., behavioral, psychophysi-
ological, and neuropsychological measures, in order to explain the contribution of
old and new theoretical models and to confirm or, in some cases, reject previously
consolidated perspectives.
This book considers these and other important topics in communication. Section I,
The Neuropsychology of Language and Communication, provides an anatomic-func-
tional perspective. Its four chapters review the contributions made to the study of
language, linguistic functions, and communication by the neuropsychological
approach. The first chapter considers the neuropsychology of language and commu-
nication; specifically, developments in the field over the last decade and the sub-spe-
cialties of neurolinguistics and neuropragmatics. Particular attention is paid to
knowledge gained through the latter and through social neuroscience.
Methodological and technical advances are explored in Chapter 2, which reviews the
main and more recent techniques of analysis: neuroimaging (fMRI, PET), magnetic
supports (TMS, MEG), and electrophysiological measures (ERPs). The significance
of these new technologies in the study of communication is the topic of Chapter 3,
which describes the applications of transcranial magnetic stimulation in the study of
linguistic and communicative competences. This non-invasive tool allows investiga-
tion of the neuronal basis of language in normal subjects. Chapter 4 explores the
processes underlying language comprehension, both in the visual modality of read-
ing and in the auditory modality of listening, by focusing on the main stages of lin-
guistic information processing, from the sensory to the symbolic level.
The book’s second section, Neuropragmatics. Psychophysiological,
Neuropsychological and Cognitive Correlates, covers the new discipline of neuro-
pragmatics, with specific attention paid to the relationship between theoretical mod-
els, such as pragmatic representation of the speech act, and neural correlates under-
lying the associated processes. Chapter 5 investigates these topics further in terms of
the significance of the relationship between the brain structures, functions, and men-
tal processes involved in language use. Metaphors, idioms, general non-composition-
al strings, and irony are considered through the application of different neuropsycho-
logical methodologies. In Chapter 6, “idiomatic” and “iconic” meanings are ana-
lyzed; the main experimental paradigms used are briefly reported and insights gained
from studies on patients with focal brain damage are discussed. The chapter closes
with a brief mention of idiomatic comprehension in Alzheimer’s disease and what has
been learned in investigations of a psychiatric population (schizophrenics). Chapter 7
considers the semantic and iconic correlates of idioms, examining the role of antici-
patory mechanisms in the comprehension of idiomatic expressions. These multiword
strings are characterized by the fact that their meaning is conventionalized and their
constituents are bound together in a predefined order. In Chapter 8, which concludes
section, new insights into the neurophysiological mechanisms responsible for lin-
guistic processing are presented, including selected examples of the “neurobiologi-
cal” approach to syntactic rule acquisition, semantic representation, and speech per-
ception/production.
Preface vii
ix
x Contents
2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.2 Assumptions of Cognitive Neuropsychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.2.1 Function-structure Relationship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.2.2 Structural, Functional and Representational Modularity . . . . . . . . . . . 30
2.3 Methods of Analysis in Cognitive Neuropsychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.3.1 Experimental and Clinical Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.4 Neuropsychological Measures for Language and Communication . . . 32
2.4.1 Neuropsychological Assessment and Psychometric Batteries . . . . . . . 32
2.4.2 Observational Indexes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.4.3 Psychophysiological Indexes: Neurovegetative Measures . . . . . . . . . . 36
2.4.4 Cortical Electrical Activity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.4.5 Neuroimaging: Structural and Functional Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
3.2 TMS and Language Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
3.2.1 Production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
3.2.2 Comprehension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
3.3 Motor Area and Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.4 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
xv
xvi List of Contributors