Description

Workshop on Experimental Pragmatics.

November 3, 2022

Venue: Carlos Santamaria Zentroa, room 2

Pragmatic processing and interpretation outputs

Mikhail Kissine, Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB)

9:30 - 11:00

Abstract:

Much of experimental research in pragmatics focuses on determining to which extent this or that pragmatic process involves Theory of Mind, with some researchers questioning whether all pragmatics is necessarily rooted in the ability to represent other people’s communicative intentions. Independently of one's favourite model, however, this research paradigm presupposes that pragmatic processes map on a typology of pragmatic outputs, such as implicature, metaphor, indirect speech act or irony. This way of thinking conflates the rational reconstruction of pragmatic processing as an inferential link between two syntactic strings (what is said and the putatively derived meaning) with the actual interpretation process. I will present experimental data that supports the alternative view, according to which pragmatic processes and the contextual resources on which they are based depend on contextual demands and individual characteristics, in a fashion orthogonal to typologies of pragmatic outputs.

Metaphor comprehension in (a)typical development

Nausicaa Pouscoulous, University College London (UCL)

11:15-12:45

Abstract:

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have difficulties with figurative language. These have been linked to their impaired theory of mind. Yet, immature linguistic skills might affect non-literal understanding regardless of autistic symptomatology. If so, figurative language should be more compromised in autistic children with concurrent language impairments (ALI), than those with autism but normal language (ALN), as well as populations with known language impairments who are not on the autism spectrum, such as Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and Down syndrome (DS). In fact, the scarcity of research on figurative language in DS calls for an investigation of metaphor in this population both for comparative purposes and in its own right.

I will present a series of studies with participants from children with DLD, ASD, DS, as well as typically developing children. In order to minimise cognitive demands and determine where the difficulties with metaphor comprehension arise (i.e., insufficient vocabulary knowledge, difficulty with context, or inability to make a pragmatic inference), we used an act-out reference assignment task, where children were shown pairs of minimally different toys and asked to choose the one matching the metaphorical description.

All groups achieved near ceiling performance on this task. Contrary to the literature showing that metaphor comprehension is significantly impaired in ASD, our results suggest that language ability may be the crucial factor in accounting for difficulties with metaphor comprehension, as suggested by Gernsbacher & Pripas-Kapit (2012)