On November 6, 2019, Professor Yang Yufang from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences was invited to make an academic report entitled "Discourse Comprehension - Cognitive Process and Neural Basis". This lecture is the fourth one of the "Language, Cognition and Brain Science Lecture Series", presided by the center researcher, Dr. Qun Yang and listened by nearly 50 teachers and students from both inside and outside the university.
The report introduced the ongoing research of cognitive process of discourses and neural basis from three aspects.
The first was the integration of information in discourse comprehension. According to the construction-integration model, the cognitive process of discourse comprehension can be divided into two parts: one is the integration of discourse information, including cohesion and coherence processing, partial and large-scale integration of discourse information, and the extracted theme guided by the macro-structure; the second is the construction and renewal of the situation model, as well as the event segmentation theory and neural basis as the basis of the construction.
Second, the lecture revealed the neural structures associated with discourse comprehension based on the meta-analysis of neuroimaging data, including Masson's neural network for narration comprehension; Ferstl's neural structure associated with textual coherence; and Yang XH's relationship between the cortical activation of discourse comprehension and large-scale neural networks.
Third, the regulation of process of discourse comprehension by cognitive control was also introduced. Moss and others found that there were significant differences in the cognitive control and activation states of language-related brain regions under different reading objectives and tasks, indicating that the cognitive neural processes of discourse comprehension vary with conditions.
After the lecture, the teachers and students exchanged views on related issues with Professor Yang, who introduced some classic models about discourse comprehension concisely. The simple explanations benefited all the listeners.
