An explicit goal of cognitive neuroscience is to bridge the gap between brain and mind. However, arguments in the philosophy of psychology for a level of cognitive theory independent of the neuronal implementation raise questions about the relevance of the details of nervous system activity to theories of cognitive processing. After sketching these concerns, an interdisciplinary approach to cognitive theories of language is outlined, and some recent results from event-related brain potential studies of human sentence comprehension are reviewed. These empirical studies show how neurophysiological evidence can be used to test moderately fine-grained hypotheses about the mental representations and algorithms involved in human sentence comprehension. These results about what and how the brain is computing demonstrate an evidential relation between neurophysiological data and theories of higher cognitive function. This evidential relation illustrates one way to bridge the gap between brain and mind, even in the absence of an explicit intertheoretic reduction of the sort imagined for an ideal cognitive neuroscience.
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