Bridging Cognition and Communication: Identifying Opportunities for Cross-Disciplinary Connections Using Scientometric Techniques

Casual intuition suggests that human communication and cognition would have robust connections across their relevant phenomena: Communication involves minds, and minds are often driven to communicate. Nevertheless, these domains are now represented by very distinct domains of scholarship. This paper explores ways to bridge them. We propose a bidirectional theoretical perspective on the relationship between communication and cognitive science, and support this perspective with an analysis of over 15,000 titles and abstracts in published work in these two disciplines. Using semantic analysis inspired by scientometrics, we argue for a rapprochement between these fields. Specifically, we articulate numerous promising avenues of overlap and mutual influence that may hold between them, such as connecting sociocultural and media issues in communication with core linguistic and mechanistic processes in cognitive science. We conclude with a schema for future theoretical and empirical work aligning communicative and cognitive processes.