Language, Perception, and Attention: Shared Representations & Cross-Domain Interplay
The world that we perceive and describe changes constantly. If we believe our descriptions of the world to be accurate and consistent, we must assume that the content and the structure of our speech accurately and consistently reflect the world’s constantly changing nature. This requires a cognitive system that maps dynamic perceptual input onto language in a systematic way—one where attentional salience, conceptual organization, and grammatical structure interact seamlessly. At the heart of this process is the Cognition-Language Interface: a mechanism that filters, selects, and encodes visual and conceptual information into linguistic output, reflecting both the event’s structure and the speaker’s attentional state. Critically, this interface operates via regular mappings between the speaker’s or comprehender’s attentional state (e.g., noticeability, relevance, accessibility) and the language they produce or process, blending bottom-up and top-down cognitive processes. This interface also illuminates a broader question about the interplay between domain-general (e.g., attention, memory) and domain-specific (e.g., language, arithmetic) cognitive systems, which can be further subdivided into two more specific questions:
1. Do mental representations across different knowledge domains share organizational principles, either due to representational overlap or higher-level structures that bridge these domains?
2. How do domain-specific processes—including language—interact with general cognitive systems such as attention and memory?
In my talk, I will address these questions through two lines of research. First, I will present evidence from domain-specific and cross-domain priming studies, highlighting common organizational principles underlying abstract-knowledge systems (e.g., mental arithmetic and syntactic processing). Second, I will discuss studies investigating the visuospatial and attentional mechanisms involved in accessing both concrete and abstract lexical-semantic representations. Together, this research reveals how the Cognition-Language Interface bridges perception and language and exemplifies the integration of specialized and general cognitive systems.
