Language, Cognition, and the Manipulated Brain: Theoretical and Experimental Perspectives on Manipulative Processes in Language Comprehension

Over the last decade, the cognitive response to subliminal and manipulative language has been a core concern of much recent contention within behavioral and psycholinguistic purviews. The way the brain processes contents that are implicitly conveyed in a message (such as implicatures, presuppositions, or vague expressions, among others) has been addressed from a number of theoretical and empirically-grounded perspectives and in relation to different textual genres. More recently, several findings on the mental encoding of implicit and manipulative language have been appraised in didactic and clinical contexts, notably, with a view to assessing how students and people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) or aphasia deal with under-encoded meanings in a message. The body of evidence yielded by these investigations has provided valuable insights on the impact that implicitness and manipulative linguistic processes have in everyday life, as well as on several other fields of language use (e.g. translation, second language teaching, advertising).

This Research Topic intends to gather contributions on original researches (but also systematic reviews, methods or clinical trials will be considered) privileging both theoretical and experimental perspectives on manipulative language and its cognitive and neurological underpinnings. With a closer look at the phenomenon of implicit communication, we welcome papers dealing with the following research topics (yet, related perspectives on linguistic implicitness and its manipulative consequences are also welcome):
● The role played by different types of implicit meaning (such as implicatures, presuppositions, patterns of information structure and figurative expressions, among others);
● The psycholinguistic and neurological processes involved in the computation of manipulative communicative devices;
● Behavioral and/or neurolinguistic studies analyzing the response of people with ASD, aphasia, or other kinds of cognitive impairment to manipulative content;
● Awareness of manipulative use of language in public communication (e.g. political discourse, the language of the press and TV interviews) and ways of developing didactic methods to improve comprehension of manipulative and implicit language in school contexts;
● Prosodic and intonational strategies associated with persuasive and manipulative communication;
● Corpus-based research on strategies of manipulative language within an intralinguistic and an interlinguistic perspective;
● Contrastive research on linguistic implicitness, also in second language acquisition and production.