Electrophysiological Research on Conversation and Discourse Processing

Research into the electrophysiology of language comprehension has essentially been “speakerless.” This has left three vital aspects of communication—it is social, pragmatic, and dynamic—severely underresearched. This chapter makes a case for the investigation of language users involved in active conversation and describes the problems and possibilities that accompany this choice of subject. It gives an overview of what is currently known about how the social, pragmatic, and dynamic puzzles of communication are solved by the brain, and it describes the well-filled toolbox of language-related event-related brain potential (ERP) components (e.g., Nref, N400, P600) that are at our disposal.