Language, Communication, and Social Cognition

Abstract

Abstract Human communication comprises many multifaceted abilities, most integrated through social cognitive systems and often manifesting in conversational interaction. This chapter draws connections between fundamental concepts in psycholinguistics, pragmatics, cultural evolution, and social cognition, addressing relationships between these domains of empirical and theoretical work. Language is a fundamental component of interpersonal communication and must interface with several related, highly interactive systems for the purpose of navigating complex social environments. The chapter describes research investigating how many nonlinguistic, social phenomena can affect language processing, revealing its deep social communicative functions. New sophisticated computational tools incorporating massive amounts of multimodal data are beginning to be harnessed in the context of interdisciplinary theoretical approaches, making big empirical questions tractable concerning the relationships between language, communication, and social cognition.