“From concepts to words: a neurocognitive approach” by Raphaël Fargier

Abstract: We use language to refer to the here and now, to the past and the future, to the tangible and the imaginary. Somehow, this ability to convey an infinite collection of messages and share our thoughts is linked to our ability to mentally represent the world in the form of concepts. How words referring to objects, events and abstract concepts are represented in the mind has been a crucial issue in the past 20 years. Combining concepts, approaches and tools from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience and computer science, we examine the links between the mental/neural representations of words and features of their referents, touching upon an issue that goes back to philosophy: the symbolic vs. grounded nature of representations.

Yet, using language to communicate requires to transform those concepts into articulated speech sounds, and to map such speech signals (or written signs) to meaning. In the second part of the course, I rely on psycho- and neuro-linguistics to outline the neural and cognitive operations (i.e. computations) that allow people to retrieve and use representations to convey meaning. Featuring cutting-edge approaches and tools in electrophysiology, we will touch upon issues related to modularity vs. seriality of linguistic processes.