Conversation and Cognition

Conversation and Cognition
Author: Hedwig te Molder
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2005-04-07
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780521790208

Publisher Description

Cognition and Communication

Cognition and Communication
Author: Norbert Schwarz
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 125
Release: 2014-03-05
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 131777888X

Psychological research into human cognition and judgment reveals a wide range of biases and shortcomings. Whether we form impressions of other people, recall episodes from memory, report our attitudes in an opinion poll, or make important decisions, we often get it wrong. The errors made are not trivial and often seem to violate common sense and basic logic. A closer look at the underlying processes, however, suggests that many of the well known fallacies do not necessarily reflect inherent shortcomings of human judgment. Rather, they partially reflect that research participants bring the tacit assumptions that govern the conduct of conversation in daily life to the research situation. According to these assumptions, communicated information comes with a guarantee of relevance and listeners are entitled to assume that the speaker tries to be informative, truthful, relevant, and clear. Moreover, listeners interpret the speakers' utterances on the assumption that they are trying to live up to these ideals. This book introduces social science researchers to the "logic of conversation" developed by Paul Grice, a philosopher of language, who proposed the cooperative principle and a set of maxims on which conversationalists implicitly rely. The author applies this framework to a wide range of topics, including research on person perception, decision making, and the emergence of context effects in attitude measurement and public opinion research. Experimental studies reveal that the biases generally seen in such research are, in part, a function of violations of Gricean conversational norms. The author discusses implications for the design of experiments and questionnaires and addresses the socially contextualized nature of human judgment.

Discourse and Cognition

Discourse and Cognition
Author: Derek Edwards
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 370
Release: 1997-02-10
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780803976979

`For those already familiar with discursive work it will be a joy - Edwards writes with enormous clarity and insight. For psychologists whose work involves an understanding of the relations between language and cognition this book will be essential reading.... This is a demanding book that will repay close attention. It can also be dipped into as a resource for the brilliant reworkings of traditional psychological topic areas, such as emotion, language, cognition, categories, AI, narrative, scripts and developmental psychology. If you want a glimpse into the future of psychology, get this book - the end of cognitivism starts here' - History and Philosophy of Psychology The central project of this mult

Narrative Gravity

Narrative Gravity
Author: Rukmini Bhaya Nair
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 457
Release: 2004-06-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1134397917

In this elegantly written and theoretically sophisticated work, Rukmini Bhaya Nair asks why human beings across the world are such compulsive and inventive storytellers. Extending current research in cognitive science and narratology, she argues that we seem to have a genetic drive to fabricate as a way of gaining the competitive advantages such fictions give us. She suggests that stories are a means of fusing causal and logical explanations of 'real' events with emotional recognition, so that the lessons taught to us as children, and then throughout our lives via stories, lay the cornerstones of our most crucial beliefs. Nair's conclusion is that our stories really do make us up, just as much as we make up our stories.

Social and Cognitive Approaches to Interpersonal Communication

Social and Cognitive Approaches to Interpersonal Communication
Author: Susan R. Fussell
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2014-02-25
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317778979

Historically, the social aspects of language use have been considered the domain of social psychology, while the underlying psycholinguistic mechanisms have been the purview of cognitive psychology. Recently, it has become increasingly clear that these two dimensions are highly interrelated: cognitive mechanisms underlying speech production and comprehension interact with social psychological factors, such as beliefs about one's interlocutors and politeness norms, and with the dynamics of the conversation itself, to produce shared meaning. This realization has led to an exciting body of research integrating the social and cognitive dimensions which has greatly increased our understanding of human language use. Each chapter in this volume demonstrates how the theoretical approaches and research methods of social and cognitive psychology can be successfully interwoven to provide insight into one or more fundamental questions about the process of interpersonal communication. The topics under investigation include the nature and role of speaker intentions in the communicative process, the production and comprehension of indirect speech and figurative language, perspective-taking and conversational collaboration, and the relationships between language, cognition, culture, and social interaction. The book will be of interest to all those who study interpersonal language use: social and cognitive psychologists, theoretical and applied linguists, and communication researchers.

Dialogue and Dementia

Dialogue and Dementia
Author: Robert W. Schrauf
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-11-20
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1317916611

This volume takes the positive view that conversation between persons with dementia and their interlocutors is a privileged site for ongoing cognitive engagement. The book aims to identify and describe specific linguistic devices or strategies at the level of turn-by-turn talk that promote and extend conversation, and to explore real-world engagements that reflect these strategies. Final reflections tie these linguistic strategies and practices to wider issues of the "self" and "agency" in persons with dementia. Thematically, the volume fosters an integrated perspective on communication and cognition in terms of which communicative resources are recognized as cognitive resources, and communicative interaction is treated as reflecting cognitive engagement. This reflects perspectives in cognitive anthropology and cognitive science that regard human cognitive activity as distributed and culturally rooted. This volume is intended for academic researchers and advanced students in applied linguistics, linguistic and medical anthropology, nursing, and social gerontology; and practice professionals in speech-language pathology and geropsychology.

Prejudice in Discourse

Prejudice in Discourse
Author: Teun A. van Dijk
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 182
Release: 1984-01-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027280037

In this book, a study is made of ethnic prejudice in cognition and conversation, based on intensive interviewing of white majority group members. After an introductory survey of traditional and more recent approaches in social psychology to the study of prejudice, a new 'sociocognitive' theory is sketched. This theory explains how cognitive representations and strategies of ethnic prejudice depend on their social functions within intergroup relations. It is also shown how ethnic prejudice is communicated in society through everyday talk among majority members. The major part of the book systematically analyzes the various dimensions of prejudiced conversations, such as topical structures, storytelling, argumentation, local semantic strategies, style and rhetoric, and more specific conversational properties. It is shown that such an explicit discourse analysis may reveal underlying cognitive representations and strategic uses of prejudice. Moreover, it appeared that many aspects of prejudiced talk are geared towards the overall strategic goals of adequate self-expression and positive self-presentation. This book is interdisciplinary in nature and should be of interest to linguists, discourse analysts, cognitive and social psychologists, sociologists, and all those interested in ethnic stereotypes, prejudice, and racism.

The Conversation Frame

The Conversation Frame
Author: Esther Pascual
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027266506

This edited volume brings together the latest research on fictive interaction, that is the use of the frame of ordinary conversation as a means to structure cognition (talking to oneself), discourse (monologues organized as dialogues), and grammar (“why me? attitude”). This follows prior work on the subject by Esther Pascual and other authors, most of whom are also contributors to this volume. The 17 chapters in the volume explore fictive interaction as a fundamental cognitive phenomenon, as a ubiquitous discourse-structuring device, as a possibly universal linguistic construction, and as an effective communicative strategy in persuasion and language pathology. The data discussed involve a wide variety of unrelated languages (spoken and signed) and modes of communication (oral, written, visual), across cultural contexts and historical time. The research presented combines linguistics and cognitive science, while bridging the gap between core grammatical studies and modern conversation and discourse analysis. The volume further reaches across what may be the most basic divide in linguistics: that between descriptive, theoretical, and applied linguistics.

The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics

The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics
Author: Barbara Dancygier
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 1427
Release: 2017-06-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1108146139

The best survey of cognitive linguistics available, this Handbook provides a thorough explanation of its rich methodology, key results, and interdisciplinary context. With in-depth coverage of the research questions, basic concepts, and various theoretical approaches, the Handbook addresses newly emerging subfields and shows their contribution to the discipline. The Handbook introduces fields of study that have become central to cognitive linguistics, such as conceptual mappings and construction grammar. It explains all the main areas of linguistic analysis traditionally expected in a full linguistics framework, and includes fields of study such as language acquisition, sociolinguistics, diachronic studies, and corpus linguistics. Setting linguistic facts within the context of many other disciplines, the Handbook will be welcomed by researchers and students in a broad range of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, gesture studies, computational linguistics, and multimodal studies.