Psychological and Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Presupposition Processing in Speech and Language Processing

The use of linguistic presupposition is essential for indexing human cognitive development and enhancing language communication efficiency. A speaker who uses a presupposition implicitly assumes that the listener knows the background of what is being said and such knowledge is taken for granted in the communicative discourse. The presupposed meaning is normally embedded lexically or structurally (through the “presupposition trigger”) and can be derived by the listener upon encountering the trigger. To achieve the capability of understanding such meaning, children must grasp certain maxims of language use or develop normally in their pragmatic ability. Recent literature has marked the cognitive costs and benefits of recognizing the presupposition during language processing. For instance, some studies employed the neurophysiological measures and revealed an effort in contextual updating or discourse linking upon difficulty in integrating the presupposition trigger into the context. However, to better understand the relation of presupposition with our neurocognitive architectures that support language processing, and other higher-level operations such as inference, attention, perspective-taking, many questions require further examination.

It is still unclear how the dynamic processes of presuppositions processing (e.g., generating and verifying the presuppositions) take place. This is vital to the further understanding of online presupposition processing and the development of communicative functions. Moreover, it is unclear how the other types of contextual information, such as the mutual knowledge shared by the speaker and the listener, or the prosody of the speaker, are involved in inferring different types of pragmatic meanings underlying the recognition of presupposition. Does processing/acquisition of different types of linguistic presupposition (e.g., factive, repetitive, counter-expectational, etc.) rely on different neurocognitive mechanisms/ developmental prerequisites? What is the relation between the processing of presupposition and that of implicature? How does perspective shifting or other cognitive processes contribute to the derivation and verification of the presupposition processing? How does the processing of presupposition interact with other types of linguistic information, such as lexico-semantic information, world knowledge, syntactic structure in both comprehension and production, and at different ages of language users?

In this Frontiers Research Topic, we aim to solicit a range of original research articles that contribute to the recent advances in understanding the psychological, neurocognitive and developmental mechanisms underlying presupposition in language, speech and communication. We welcome the articles drawing upon different psycholinguistic paradigms, various types of behavioral and neurocognitive measurements (e.g., fMRI, EEG, TMS, fNIRS), computational modeling, individual differences methods, and neuropsychological methods that track typical and atypical language users throughout the life span.