Language, Action, Interaction Neuropragmatic Perspectives on Symbols, Meaning, and Context-Dependent Function

Neural mechanisms of cognition are built upon action, action perception, and interaction. This chapter explains how this novel perspective, immanent to the "pragmatic turn" in cognitive neuroscience, is enforced by research on language, semantic concepts, and social communication. Whereas classic approaches attributed these specifically human domains to genetic endowment and encapsulated processes, modem cognitive and brain research has accumulated evidence that mechanisms for speech sounds and symbol forms emerge as a result of sensorimotor functional interaction in the brain, and that conceptual-semantic information is extracted from the interaction of learners with their environment and peers. Correlational Hebbian learning in anatomically prestructured network architectures binds articulatory-motor to auditory-perceptual (phonological) knowledge. This epigenetic neurobiological perspective also explains important aspects of whole form (lexical) storage of symbols and constructions, combinatorial (distributional, syntactic, or grammatical) linkage between stored forms, and context-dependent (semantic, pragmatic) binding between forms, their meaning, and interactive function. Over and above evidence for motor system activation in linguistic and conceptual processing, specific studies demonstrate its causal role for these domains. Thus, action-perception theory offers a novel avenue toward neurobiological explanation of the brain mechanisms for language, concepts, and pragmatic communication.