FROM BRAIN TO MIND - EVENT-RELATED POTENTIAL EVIDENCE FOR SENTENCE COMPREHENSION PROCESSES

An explicit goal of cognitive neuroscience is to bridge the gap betwee n brain and mind. However; arguments in the philosophy of psychology f or a level of cognitive theory independent of the neuronal implementat ion raise questions about the relevance of the details of nervous syst em activity to theories ofcognitive processing. After sketching these concerns, an interdisciplinary approach to cognitive theories of langu age is outlined and some recent results from event-related brain poten tial studies of human sentence comprehension are reviewed. These empir ical studies show how neurophysiological evidence can be used to test moderately fine-grained hypotheses about the mental representations an d algorithms involved in human sentence comprehension. These results a bout what and how the brain is computing demonstrate an evidential rel ation between neurophysiological data and theories of higher cognitive function. This evidential relation illustrates one way to bridge the gap between brain and mind, even in the absence of an explicit interth eoretic reduction of the sort imagined for an ideal cognitive neurosci ence.