A neurolinguistic approach to the narrative text: a theoretical perspective

Abstract

The narrative text permeates human experience. However, narrative understanding is not a simple task, since its comprehension goes through different levels, as proposed by Kintsch; Van Dijk (1978, 1983), Van Dijk (1992, 2010), Kintsch (1998), Kintsch; Rawson (2013), in The Model of Text Processing. From the perspective of Neurolinguistics, we bring the following questions: How narrative text is processed by the cerebral hemispheres? What do experimental neuroimaging studies tell us about it? Which brain areas are embedded in the processing of narrative? In order to discuss these issues based on the literature, and to offer theoretical background for research in this field, we bring contributions from Linguistics and Neurosciences about how the cerebral hemispheres cooperate to process the narrative text.