Abstract

Communication[aut]Communication challenges to the twenty-first century humankind are as serious as materialistic ones. Search for meaning, the ever-present focus of human praxis, has gained new urgency in the current age of diversity and rapid transformations in all social spheres. This chapter is an overview of research on meaning-loaded forms in social interactions presented in the current volume. Modern communicative practices are characterized by a profound change in their shapes and formats: both everyday and institutional communication is becoming increasingly multimodal and digital. These new formats of communication require new approaches that would reveal underlying processes happening in the participants’ cognition.[aut]cognition. In their contributions, the authors explore the connection between new communication patterns, technological innovations and underlying cognitive processes[aut]Cognitiveprocess in an array of communicative situations in both physical and virtual environments. Recent decades have seen a singularly close integration of verbal and visual semiotic systems, which has become essential for social meaning construction and interpretation. Technological advances bring to the fore the role of digital competency in educational environments, generating intense discussions on the impact of video gamesGamevideo games, corpus technologiesCorpus technologies, online projects and other digital pedagogyPedagogy techniques of effective classroom communication. In their observations on and theoretical implications of the diverse communicative patterns the authors draw on recent advances in neuroscience, genre theory, psychology and psycholinguisticsPsycholinguistics. The volume may provide a point of reference for further discussions of multimodality[aut]Multimodality, digitalization[aut]Digitalization and cognitivity as the phenomena pertaining to the present day communicative and educational contexts.