Leonardo Fernandino E-mail: fagundes@ucla.edu I am generally interested in the nature of the higher mental functions in humans, such as language, concept formation, and semantic representation. Humans are unique in the biological world in their capacity to transform their environment and in the complexity of their social relations. These capacities rely on cognitive mechanisms that are implemented in the brain, and that have evolved from those of our non-human ancestors. What is it, then, that allows humans, but not chimpanzees and other primates, to acquire grammatical language and develop a complex culture? What cognitive and neural processes do humans have in common with other species, and what processes are exclusive to the human brain? I think these questions address the core of the philosophical inquiries about human nature, about what it means to be human. I intend to approach these issues by studying how language and meaning are represented/processed in the brain, how they influence each other, and the extent to which they are independent from each other. In my first year, I have studied some of the conditions that influence the division of labor between the two cerebral hemispheres during linguistic processing, using lexical decision tasks. My plans for the following years include behavioral, neuroimaging and EEG studies of pragmatic aspects of linguistic communication (basic speech acts), as well as the interrelationship between pragmatic, semantic and syntactic aspects of language. Back