4월에 진행되는 뇌인지과학 세미나에 많은 신청과 참여 부탁드립니다.

주제 : Looking beyond the Sentence in Language Processing: ERP & Eye-tracking Evidence from Implicature and Emoticon Studies

초록 : Human language comprehension rarely stops at the literal meaning of a sentence. To arrive at a speaker's intended meaning, listeners must go beyond the linguistic string itself — integrating contextual cues, pragmatic knowledge, and even non-verbal signals such as emoticons. This talk presents four lines of research that converge on a single question: how does the brain process meaning that lies beyond the sentence?

The first two studies examine conversational implicature — the implicit meanings listeners routinely infer in everyday discourse. Using ERP methodology, we first investigate how the brain computes pragmatic inferences in real time, revealing the neurocognitive signatures of implicature processing. We then ask whether large language models (LLMs) show comparable sensitivity to the same phenomena, offering a revealing comparison between human pragmatic competence and current AI language understanding.

The remaining two studies extend the "beyond the sentence" framework into the domain of digital communication. We present ERP evidence for the online integration of sentential and emoticon valence, demonstrating that the brain treats emoticons as effectively meaningful signals that interact with — rather than merely accompany — linguistic content. Finally, drawing on the K-EMOTION project, we use eye-tracking methodology to examine how Kakao emoticon use reflects generational differences in digital emotional expression and communication style, tracing readers' real-time attention and processing patterns across age groups.

Taken together, these four studies argue that a full account of language processing must encompass pragmatic inference, affective integration, and multimodal meaning-making — domains in which ERP and eye-tracking methods remain uniquely indispensable.