Les neurosciences cognitives du langage, de l'autisme et des styles cognitifs

The present thesis comprises a set of three research articles (two studies and one review article) on the cognitive neuroscience of language, all of which were written with the purpose of understanding the benefits that contemporary (neuro)linguistic theory may draw from an extensive study of the cognitive and neural processes underlying Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and vice versa. Two studies are presented, using event-related brain potentials, which provide preliminary evidence in typical individuals for two aspects of sentence processing in need of future investigation in ASD participants: (1) The neural correlates of the peculiar syntactic and semantic nature of verbs of experience (Experiencer Subject verbs, i.e., The girl has feared the storm) as opposed to verbs of action (Agent Subject verbs, i.e., The boys have eaten the fries) and their potential interface with Theory of Mind -- the ability to attribute mental states to self and others -- known to present delays and impairments in autism, and (2) the neural correlates of "visual imagery" skills, as assessed through the Raven Matrices, on comprehenders' ability to detect word category violations (e.g., He made the meal to enjoy with friends/He made the enjoy to meal with friends) in a balanced visual paradigm and their potential insights into the role of visual imagery in language comprehension, known to play a potentially predominant role in ASD. The review article attempts to provide a larger perspective on the role of the cognitive neuroscience of ASD in the biology of language, in which the importance of considering autism as a "cognitive style" rather than as a disorder is given greater value, especially relative to the common notion of autism solely as a Theory of Mind impairment. Aside from their potential prospects for future research in autistic populations, these three articles also attempt to frame their topic of inquiry into the broader context of contemporary research questions on language development and language comprehension, such as the role of animacy in language processing (the "semantic P600" debate), asymmetric sampling theories of speech and music perception, the role of vision in language, modularity, cognitive styles or Bayesian inference.;Keywords: Language, Autism, Event-related Potentials, Thematic Animacy Reversals, Theory of Mind, Cognitive Styles, Word Category Violations, Cognitive Neuroscience.