Introduction

The study of language, like other cognitive sciences, requires of us to indulge in a kind of mind reading. We use a variety of methods in an attempt to access the hidden representations and processes that allow humans to converse. In formal linguistics intuitive judgments by the theorist are used as primary evidence – an approach that brings well-understood dangers of bias (Gibson and Fedorenko, 2010), but in practice can work well (Sprouse et al., 2013). Aggregating judgments over groups of informants is widely used in cognitive and computational linguistics, through both experts in controlled environments and crowdsourcing of naive annotators (Snow et al., 2008). Experimental psycholinguists have used a range of methods that do not rely on intuition, judgments, or subjective reflection, such as the speed of self-paced reading, or the order and timing of gaze events as recorded with eye-tracking technologies (Rayner, 1998).

Brain-recording technologies offer a different kind of evidence, as they are the closest we can get empirically to the object of interest: human cognition. Despite the technical challenges involved, especially the complexity of the recorded signals and the extraneous noise that they contain, brain imaging has a decades-long history in psycholinguistics.