Summary
The « Brain and Language Research Institute » aims at understanding and modeling language processing by bringing together knowledge in linguistics, neurosciences, medicine, psychology and computer science.
It is an extremely ambitious objective and probably still today out of reach for now. However, we have an unquestionable number of assets enabling us to advance in this direction. First of all, each discipline has reached a sufficient level of maturity to be able to start to adopt an overall point of view on language. Thus linguistics, which for a long time organised its research in a modular approach, is now trying to explain how language functions in interactions between various fields such as prosody, syntax, pragmatics etc. In the same way, data processing now raises the question of language processing hybrid models, at the same time using sequential (locally) and parallel mechanisms (overall), making the most of stochastic strategies in certain cases, in others using symbolic strategies. This work also deals with cognitive psychology, a discipline which analyses language as a cognitive function and its relationships to other functions such as memory or control. More recently, the study of pathological models and neuroscience moved towards a more integrated description of physiological constraints and cerebral functioning, in particular making it possible to explain better context adaptation thanks to greater plasticity of the mobilized areas and their interactions.
Our ambition is to propose a model explaining language as a complex process, made up of various components whose functions must be described in relation to that of others. The BLRI proposes in this direction to contribute to the development of a generic and interdisciplinary model explaining language processing and its cerebral bases.
It is an extremely ambitious objective and probably still today out of reach for now. However, we have an unquestionable number of assets enabling us to advance in this direction. First of all, each discipline has reached a sufficient level of maturity to be able to start to adopt an overall point of view on language. Thus linguistics, which for a long time organised its research in a modular approach, is now trying to explain how language functions in interactions between various fields such as prosody, syntax, pragmatics etc. In the same way, data processing now raises the question of language processing hybrid models, at the same time using sequential (locally) and parallel mechanisms (overall), making the most of stochastic strategies in certain cases, in others using symbolic strategies. This work also deals with cognitive psychology, a discipline which analyses language as a cognitive function and its relationships to other functions such as memory or control. More recently, the study of pathological models and neuroscience moved towards a more integrated description of physiological constraints and cerebral functioning, in particular making it possible to explain better context adaptation thanks to greater plasticity of the mobilized areas and their interactions.
Our ambition is to propose a model explaining language as a complex process, made up of various components whose functions must be described in relation to that of others. The BLRI proposes in this direction to contribute to the development of a generic and interdisciplinary model explaining language processing and its cerebral bases.