Cognitive and neural mechanisms of human communication

This Research Topic aims to advance an integrated understanding of the cognitive and neural mechanisms that support human communication, and how these mechanisms emerge, mature, and change across development and the lifespan. It will examine how people produce, perceive, interpret, and coordinate communicative signals across speech, language, gesture, facial expression, gaze, prosody, and other verbal and nonverbal channels. The Research Topic will bring together behavioral, neuroscientific, developmental, computational, and applied perspectives to identify how communicative information is represented, integrated, predicted, and adapted in real time, and how these real-time processes shape, and are shaped by, learning and developmental trajectories. Particular attention will be given to multisensory integration, sensorimotor prediction and feedback, temporal coordination, interpersonal alignment, and the influence of social context and individual differences. Contributions may also address how communication develops and changes across the lifespan, how it is affected by neurological or developmental conditions, and how mechanistic research can inform language learning, education, rehabilitation, and human-technology interaction.Human communication depends on the rapid coordination of multiple cognitive, sensory, motor, and social processes. Listeners integrate linguistic content with facial movements, gestures, gaze, prosody, and contextual knowledge, while speakers coordinate speech with bodily actions and continuously adapt to their communication partners. Although multimodal information can facilitate comprehension and interpersonal coordination, its benefits depend on factors such as signal congruency, timing, reliability, context, and task demands. Communication also relies on prediction and feedback: speakers monitor the sensory consequences of their actions, listeners generate expectations about incoming information, and interacting partners adjust their behavior in response to one another. These same mechanisms underpin how communicative skills are acquired in early development, refined through learning, and reorganized or supported in later life and in clinical conditions. However, findings remain distributed across cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, developmental science, and clinical research. Important questions therefore remain about how communicative signals are combined and coordinated, how these abilities develop and are learned, and why communication sometimes succeeds or breaks down.This Research Topic focuses on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying human communication across modalities, contexts, populations, and stages of the lifespan. By linking real-time communicative mechanisms to developmental change and learning outcomes, it speaks directly to the study of cognitive development and its applications in education and rehabilitation. Applied and translational studies are welcome where they retain a clear focus on underlying communicative mechanisms.We welcome contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:* Speech and language production and comprehension* Gesture, facial expression, gaze, prosody, and other nonverbal signals* Multisensory and multimodal integration in communication* Sensorimotor prediction, sensory feedback, and error monitoring* Speech-gesture coordination and communicative timing* Turn-taking, interpersonal alignment, and interactive communication* The roles of attention, memory, cognitive control, and social cognition* Individual, developmental, and lifespan differences* The development and learning of communicative skills, and their trajectories across childhood, adulthood, and ageing* Multilingual and multicultural communication* Communication in neurological, developmental, and clinical populations* Communication in education, rehabilitation, virtual environments, and human-technology interaction* Conditions under which multimodal signals facilitate, interfere with, or fail to support communication Topic editors: Brian Mathias, Anna Zamm, Floris Tijmen van Vugt Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/84812/cognitive-and-neural-mechanisms-of-human-communication