Man–Machine Dialogue Fields - Man-Machine Dialogue: Design and Challenges - page 30

faculty. Linguistics is obviously a part of this: it approaches language
faculties through the study of language as a system of signs, with a semantic
aspect that focuses on meaning and is thus close to semiotics whose more
specific object is the meaning of signs. Psychology is also a part of this: it
focuses on the behavior of humans and approaches language through the
thought operations involved in language activity (cognitive psychology),
child's acquisition (developmental psychology) or even through the influence
of other individuals (social psychology). Sociology studies the behavior of
groups and societies, and approaches language through the study of
interactions, as already mentioned with the conversational analysis approach
and the study of collective representations carried by language.
Neurosciences, which can be compared to clinical psychology and
psychopathology, study the brain's anatomy and functioning, and more
specifically approach language through its pathologies. Psycholinguistics, a
branch of cognitive psychology obviously linked to linguistics, and also
historically linked to information theory with notions of information, code
and message, studies the psychological activities through which a subject
acquires and implements a language system, notably through laboratory
experiments. Neuropsycholinguistics brings the focuses of psycholinguistics
and neurolinguistics (a branch of neurosciences covering the understanding,
generation and acquisition of language) together and focuses on the study of
the activation of areas of the brain.
As for philosophy, with its aspects of language philosophy and more
recently cognitive philosophy, it contributes different points of view,
including the history of ideas and the logic underpinning language, and
philosophy provides epistemological clarification. Just like cognitive
philosophy, the cognitive qualifier allows us to specify and even outline a new
scientific field in an established discipline. This is, for example, the case of
cognitive ergonomics, which refers to the study of interactions between a
human user and a device that thus involves mental charge notions or human
factors and that is involved in the design of MMI and MMD systems,
especially for automatic generation and multimedia information presentation.
This is also the case for cognitive linguistics which, at first, provides
linguistics with the notion of cognitive plausibility, and has now established
itself in a disciplinary field around questions on links between language and
on the nature of knowledge constituting language faculties, or the
computer-based modeling of knowledge.