neurolinguistics has extended its scope well beyond aphasia studies and embraced the whole new spectrum of neuroimaging techniques, thereby blending gradually into the cognitive neuroscience of language – see below.
Cognitive science
The academic discipline cognitive science is the most prominent outcome of the ‘great academic paradigm shift’ described earlier. Its remit includes the ‘scientific study of minds and brains, be they real, artificial, human or animal’ (Nadel and Piattelli-Palmarini 2003: p. xiii). It is thus a rich and diverse area of the study of the mind that has been fuelled by the academic world’s (and also laypeople’s) unrelenting interest in the operation of the brain and the growing excitement about the fact that for the first time in human history there are realistic ways of peeping into what had been treated for centuries as a ‘black box’. (For a discussion of a range of brain-related issues, See Ch. 2.) This momentum is palpable in the growing number of university programmes, faculty positions, international conferences, and publications such as academic journals, handbooks, and encyclopaedias that are explicitly related to cognitive science, and which are usually seen as the indices of the vitality of a field. The significance of the field is also measurable in the prestige of its main scholars and the amount of research funding and media coverage that is associated with it. All in all, it is good to be a cognitive scientist nowadays!
In an interview about the genesis of cognitive science, George Miller, one of the fathers of the field, stated that the birthday of the discipline was 11 September 1956, the date of a meeting at MIT where ‘leading cognitivists from computer science, linguistics, and psychology all came together for the first time and began to realize they shared their interest in the human mind’ (Gazzaniga, Ivry, and Mangun 2002: 18). Three talks in particular – Miller’s ‘The magical number seven’ (Miller 1956), Chomsky’s ‘Three models of language’, and Newell and Simon’s ‘Logic theory machine’ – were influential in laying the foundations of a movement whose success story has exceeded even the most fervent enthusiasts’ expectations. The four scholars also reflect the hugely interdisciplinary nature of the field – it draws on concepts and methods from linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, computer science, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. One obvious attraction of the term ‘cognitive science’ for members of all these disciplines is that it helps to distinguish the field from both the humanities and the social sciences, making it appear more like the natural science of the brain.
The most dynamic current direction in cognitive research involves various forms of brain imaging. This area is often distinguished from cognitive science by the label ‘cognitive neuroscience’, although this is admittedly a rather permeable boundary. Interestingly, this permeability was not always in existence. For a good 25 years after its birth, classical cognitive science rejected the significance of the neurosciences because the dominant scientific pursuit concerned the generation of complex symbolic representations and computational models that required little or no contact with the brain. Neurons were relegated to the role of ‘mere implementation’ (Nadel and Piattelli-Palmarini 2003: p. xviii). Long and Doughty (2003) report on a survey that found that in the field’s leading journal —Cognitive Science– and flagship conference – the annual conventions of the Cognitive Science Society – two subdisciplines, cognitive psychology and computer science, dominated the period between 1977 and 1995, accounting for over half the articles and papers. Even today, there are surprisingly few studies that are equally strong on cognitive theorizing and empirical neuroimaging. For this reason, I will discuss cognitive neuroscience separately below.
Cognitive science and SLA
In the concluding chapter of their comprehensive handbook of SLA, Long and Doughty (2003) argue that for many SLA researchers who are looking for a new identity or institutional home in the ongoing academic paradigm shift, the ‘cognitive scientist’ label is more attractive than that of ‘social scientist’. Indeed, I assume that many, if not most, of the applied linguists cited in this book would agree with this claim. Research topics such as maturational constraints, explicit vs. implicit learning/memory, automatization, computer modelling of language processes, grammaticalization, aptitude complexes, and the like are obvious targets for cognitively minded scholars. As Long and Doughty argue, ‘Underlying all their work is a shared conception of SLA as a cognitive process involving representations and computations on those representations’ (p. 869). Consequently, their conclusion is straightforward:
For SLA to achieve the stability, stimulation, and research funding to survive as a viable field of inquiry, it needs an intellectual and institutional home that is to some degree autonomous and separate from the disciplines and departments that currently offer shelter. Cognitive science is the logical choice. (ibid.)
The problem with this seemingly convincing contention is that due to the diverse role and nature of language in the world, it is equally possible to generate a similarly convincing list of key research issues that are targets for non-cognitively minded scholars. Topics such as identity, self, emotion, environment, social interaction, situational constraints, speech accommodation, caretaker talk, language policy, and the like highlight a completely different dimension of the complex dynamics of SLA; and we may even go one step further and compile a third, pedagogically grounded list comprising topics such as teaching methodology, learner groups, corrective feedback, curriculum, learning tasks, materials design, etc. Thus, it is hard to separate SLA from the social and instructional arena in which it takes place, an issue that has been argued passionately in a recent focus issue of The Modern Language Journal (Lafford 2007). Consequently, for many applied linguists the search for an identity may not end with cognitive science.
Cognitive neuroscience
Keeping up to date with cognitive neuroscience is much like surfing the Big Wave at Waikiki Beach. New findings keep rolling in and maintaining a stable balance is a big challenge. It is exciting, fun and, at times, a little bit scary.
The reason for talking about cognitive neuroscience separately from cognitive science is due to the unprecedented recent progress of neuroresearch as a result of major technological developments in neuroimaging techniques that have offered an entirely new window into the human mind, allowing the online study of the human brain while it is engaged in various cognitive tasks. As Nadel and Piattelli-Palmarini (2003: p. xxiv) summarize, the subsequent explosion of research on the brain mechanisms underlying human cognitive functions has been ‘nothing short of phenomenal’. This intoxicating new potential (and the concerns with it) will be described in depth in the next chapter, so let me here merely outline the main parameters of the discipline. According to Gazzaniga, Ivry, and Mangun (2002), the term ‘cognitive neuroscience’ was coined in a New York City taxi in the late 1970s to give name to a ‘new mission’ (p. 19) to examine how the brain enables the mind. Interestingly, one of the passengers in this famous taxi was the very George Miller who played a key role at the 1956 MIT conference that is usually seen as the starting point of cognitive science.
The missionary spirit has not subsided over the past three decades. The following extract from the Preface of Baars and Gage’s (2007b: p. xiii) recent summary of the field reflects the kind of excited confidence that accompanies successful expeditions:
[W]e are seeing a marriage of the cognitive and brain sciences, building on historic advances over the last few decades. Cognitive and perceptual mechanisms that were inferred from behaviour can now be observed more directly in the brain, using a variety of novel brain imaging methods. For the first time, we can observe the living brain in real time, doing what it has evolved to do over hundreds of millions of years. The result is astonishingly rich, combining psychology and biology, medicine, biochemistry and physics.
In the Preface of another best-selling textbook on cognitive neuroscience, Gazzaniga, Ivry, and Mangun (2002: p. xv) address
