Experimental Pragmatics

Scalar implicature has served as a test case for investigating the nature of inference processes in language comprehension. Specifically, the question of whether or not scalar implicatures are computed by default has been extensively investigated in recent years. We argue that the question of default is overly simplistic and propose instead to think of scalar implicature computation as a problem of optimal cue combination within a constraint-based framework. We provide evidence from three experiments supporting the view that multiple constraints of differing strength operate in parallel to provide probabilistic support for or against an implicature.

Ogni giorno, a volte senza nemmeno rendercene conto, comunichiamo alle persone attorno a noi molto più di quello che diciamo. Non veicoliamo messaggi solo attraverso le parole, ma anche con il linguaggio del corpo e, sorprendentemente, con ciò che “non diciamo” ma comunichiamo implicitamente. Inoltre, il contesto intorno a noi condiziona profondamente il messaggio. Tutto questo sembra avvenire senza sforzo alcuno, ma è veramente così? Come mai capita di essere fraintesi o che qualcuno non rida alla nostra battuta? A queste domande prova a rispondere una nuova disciplina di ricerca, la pragmatica sperimentale. La pragmatica sperimentale adotta metodologie scientifiche per studiare quanto la relazione fra parlanti e contesto, fra la nostra mente e quella di coloro che ci ascoltano, sia alla base della comunicazione umana. In questo libro passeremo in rassegna molti fenomeni linguistici in cui il ruolo del contesto e dei partecipanti sono indispensabili per trasmettere informazioni in modo efficace; vedremo così come la ricerca ci stia aiutando a capire i meccanismi che ci permettono di comunicare e cosa succede quando questi meccanismi si inceppano.

In this talk I try to make progress in capturing an informal observation about only and even, which, although rather old, has not been formally captured by traditional formal entries of these two particles. The observation is that only and even express some sort of ‘scalar antonymy’, and it is illustrated in (1):
(1) (Context: We are arriving late to a committee meeting evaluating John’s and Bill’s achievements, and manage to hear what one of the committee members says about Bill):
a.. …and during the last 3 years he only wrote [3]F papers. > 5 is ‘a little’
b. …and during the last 3 years he  even wrote [5]F papers . > 5 is ‘a lot’
I examine three schematic suggestions which did try to capture the scalar antonymy of only and even, namely that only vs. even presuppose that their prejacent, p is lower vs. higher (respectively), (a) than what is expected /  what is the default standard in the context (the ‘mirative / evaluative antonymy’ view), (b) than some (salient) alternative in the set of contextually relevant focus alternatives, C, (the ‘existential antonymy’ view), or (c) than all alternatives in C (the ‘superlative antonymy’ view). The differences between these views are often subtle, and in many contexts the predictions they make empirically overlap. One goal of the paper, then, is to examine the felicity and interpretation of only and even in a wider range of contexts than has been done so far, so we end up with  better diagnostics for teasing apart the predictions of each of these view. A second goal is to argue that this examination supports the preferability of the ‘superlative’ view over the ‘existential’ and the ‘mirative / evaluative’ views, and to discuss ways to handle issues which were raised against this view. Finally, I hope to discuss potential implications and open questions raised by the examination of the scalar antonymy of only and even regarding the way contextual factors affect the construction of sets of alternatives, and compare them to parallel implications and questions raised in experimental studies on activation  / processing of alternatives and in research on Scalar Implicatures.

We report an eye-tracking study in which we investigate the on-line processing of written irony. Specifically, participants’ eye movements were recorded while they read sentences which were either intended ironically, or non-ironically, and subsequent text which contained pronominal reference to the ironic (or non-ironic) phrase. Results showed longer reading times for ironic comments compared to a non-ironic baseline, suggesting that additional processing was required in ironic compared to non-ironic conditions. Reading times for subsequent pronominal reference indicated that for ironic materials, both the ironic and literal interpretations of the text were equally accessible during on-line language comprehension. This finding is most in line with predictions of the graded salience hypothesis, which, in conjunction with the retention hypothesis, states that readers represent both the literal and ironic interpretation of an ironic utterance.

Humor is present in our everyday interactions and communicative settings. Just as non-literal expressions in general (e.g. metaphorical, idiomatic, or indirect constructions), humorous utterances also pose the question: how do listeners decipher the intended meaning of the utterance and cope with the apparent "mismatch" of competing meanings; how do they unwrap the relevant gist from the deceptive (non-literal) packaging and finally lend themselves to the humorous effect?

Previous research suggests that comprehending ironic utterances is a relatively late-developing skill, emerging around 5-6 years of age. This study investigated whether younger children might show an earlier understanding when ironic utterances are performed in familiar communicative situations, and investigated the relationships among irony comprehension, language, and theory of mind abilities. A group of 100 children aged 3.0-6.5 years was presented with four types of puppet scenarios depicting different communicative interactions: control, joke, contingent irony and background irony stories. Results suggested that (a) even younger children easily understand jokes, and may sometimes understand ironies; (b) children’s comprehension of irony continues to develop across early childhood; and (c) receptive vocabulary scores had simultaneous effects on irony comprehension and ToM performance.

This paper deals with how focus affects scalar implicatures in the interpretation of Serbian quantifier neki ‘some ‘ (e.g. Some apples are on the table). Two experiments have been conducted with 56 adult native Speakers of Serbian, based on a modified version of the Truth-value judgment task. Results show lower proportion of generated implicatures in Serbian than in other languages, which suggests that scalar implicatures are not generated automatically. Cardinal interpretation of the quantifier neki is dominant, quantificational interpretation and implicatures (some=not all) being facilitated with the use of partitive construction (neke od jabuka ‘some of the apples’), as well as positioning the quantified noun phrase in the final sentence position (Na stolu su neke jabuke ‘On the table are some apples’). Under certain conditions, contrastive focus affects the generation of scalar implicatures. These results show that the process of generating scalar implicatures goes beyond semantics and pragmatics, and poses responsibility on other language domains, such as informational structure.

The role of context in meaning explication in any interaction cannot be overemphasized because through it, the true pragmatic meanings of form and intentional use of language are generated. Thus, existing studies have focused their attention on the importance of context in revealing various intentional uses of language, but they have neglected intentions that are not overtly stated, especially in literary discourse. This work therefore, examines how language is used to interactively construct fraud in various discursive contexts and the various strategies employed to negotiate goals in Wole Soyinka's The Trials of Brother Jero and Jero's Metamorphosis. The study adopts a combination of Levinson's notion of Activity types and Sarangi's concept of Discourse types, it also benefits from Arundale's Face Consitituting Theory. The data, sourced from selected conversations in the texts, were subjected to pragmatic analysis. Two types of contexts characterize Wole Soyinka's The Trials of Brother Jero and Jero's Metamorphosis, namely, conflict and leadership. Three types of conflicts-goal-motivated, space/ambition-motivated and debt-motivated conflicts also characterize context of conflict. Deflection through distraction and mendacity, impersonation, double crossing; Invocation of physical and spiritual reality through blackmailing, racial sentiment, persuasion and prediction as well discursive manipulation are the goals negotiation strategies used in the identified contexts. The paper concludes that the understanding of different discursive contexts of fraud and their various strategies reveal how language is used to interactively construct fraud.

Investigating the reliability of moral intuitions is not only one of the hot topics in moral psychology but also of high importance for philosophical questions. In a recent study, the influence of framing on people's intuitions about the moral relevance of certain properties of moral scenarios was investigated to assess the validity of some crucial assumptions of moral intuitionism. While it was found that people's intuitions about moral relevance were not affected by framing effects, the findings were not fully satisfying news for moral intuitionism since a worrisome proportion of participants disagreed with the purportedly self-evident moral relevance statements. In this paper, I propose a potential alternative explanation for the low agreement rate that would be lessor rather not at all-worrisome for moral intuitionism, namely that the problematic results might be due to experimental pragmatics. To test this hypothesis, I rerun two experiments with especially low agreement rates and applied some simple measures to block unintended pragmatic considerations. This resulted in significantly higher agreement rates with the purportedly self-evident moral relevance statements than in the original. Indeed, the agreement rates were at such a high level that the findings of my study provide good news for moral intuitionism.

Discourse markers guide inferences during communication according to their morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties (Portolés 2001 [1998]; Blakemore 2002). This functional definition lies on cognitive grounds: interpreting what is communicated implies that the mind is able to combine representations by means of computations that link and adjust them (Thagard 2005 [1998]). This theoretical claim can be supported by data based on the observation of mental activity during utterance processing (Loureda et al. 2019 and 2020). In this chapter we present the results of experiments on Spanish discourse markers (Schröck 2018, Nadal 2019, Recio Fernández 2019, Cruz 2019, Narváez 2019, Salameh Jiménez 2019, Torres 2020, Cuello in preparation, Guillén in preparation). Empirical results allow to establish correlations between discourse marking and processing patterns, and are compatible with the defining properties of discourse markers as procedural-meaning expressions (Blakemore 1987, 2002, Nadal et al. 2016).

A central issue in semantics and pragmatics is to understand how various different aspects of meaning contribute to the overall conveyed meaning of an utterance. Asserted content, implicatures, and presuppositions are commonly assumed to differ in terms of their source, their status, and their interaction with the context in the theoretical literature. This chapter starts with a brief introduction of this theoretical background, and then reviews the experimental literature on related phenomena in some detail, with a focus on presuppositions. In the course of this, the contributions to the present volume are situated in the context of previous work. The conclusion provides an outlook on future directions.

While both pragmatic theory and experimental investigations of language using psycholinguistic methods have been well-established subfields in the language sciences for a long time, the field of Experimental Pragmatics, where such methods are applied to pragmatic phenomena, has only fully taken shape since the early 2000's. By now, however, it has become a major and lively area of ongoing research, with dedicated conferences, workshops, and collaborative grant projects, bringing together researchers with linguistic, psychological, and computational approaches across disciplines. Its scope includes virtually all meaning-related phenomena in natural language comprehension and production, with a particular focus on what inferences utterances give rise to that go beyond what is literally expressed by the linguistic material. One general area that has been explored in great depth consists of investigations of various 'ingredients' of meaning. A major aim has been to develop experimental methodologies to help classify various aspects of meaning, such as implicatures and presuppositions as compared to basic truth-conditional meaning, and to capture their properties more thoroughly using more extensive empirical data. The study of scalar implicatures (e.g., the inference that some, but not all students left based on the sentence Some students left.) has served as a catalyst of sorts in this area, and they constitute one of the most well-studied phenomena in Experimental Pragmatics to date. But much recent work has expanded the general approach to other aspects of meaning, including presuppositions and conventional implicatures, but also other aspects of non-literal meaning such as irony, metonymy and metaphors. The study of reference constitutes another core area of research in Experimental Pragmatics, and has a more extensive history of precursors in psycholinguistics proper. Reference resolution commonly requires drawing inferences beyond what is conventionally conveyed by the linguistic material at issue as well: the key concern is how comprehenders grasp the referential intentions of a speaker based on the referential expressions used in a given context, as well as how the speaker chooses an appropriate expression in the first place. Pronouns, demonstratives, and definite descriptions are crucial expressions of interest, with special attention to their relation to both intra-and extra-linguistic context. Furthermore, one key line of research is concerned with speakers' and listeners' capacity to keep track of both their own private perspective and the shared perspective of the interlocutors in actual interaction. 1 Given the rapid ongoing growth in the field, there is a large number of additional topical areas that cannot all be mentioned here, but the final section of the article briefly mentions further current and future areas of research.

A debate concerning associative versus inferential approaches to pragmatics has arisen within the recent ‘cognitive turn’ in the pragmatic field. The nature of on-line pragmatic processes has become the focus of attention of philosophers (Recanati 2002a, 2004, 2007b) and linguists (Wilson & Carston 2007, Carston 2007). In this paper, I review this theoretical debate and then explore and assess the recent experimental literature focusing on it (Rubio-Fernández 2007, 2012). I address the question whether non-demonstrative inferential processes implemented in a fast and automatic system (e.g. the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure) can be empirically disentangled from ‘smart’ associative systems; and I raise some doubts about whether current experimental pragmatics is able to inform the theoretical debate on the nature of on-line pragmatic processes. I conclude by emphasising the role that philosophical analysis, with its traditional methodologies, can still play in the field of cognitive pragmatics.

Focus particles such as 'only' and 'even' indicate that the focused element(s) in a sentence should be contrasted with a set of contextually defined alternatives. 'Only' indicates that properties assigned to the focus set are not shared by elements of the alternative set, whereas 'even' indicates that the focus and alternative sets share the
properties mentioned in the sentence. 'Even' has the additional function of marking the focused element as being low on a scale of alternatives ranked in terms of likelihood, thereby signaling that what is being described is somewhat surprising. Using eyetracking, we demonstrate that contrast information associated with 'only' and 'even' is rapidly processed online, with effects for 'even' being delayed, as compared with 'only' (Experiment 1). This difference in time course was not driven by the underlying semantics of the sentence without the focus particle (Experiment 2) but was probably due to even’s more complex semantic function.

Laura Nadal, Universidad de Heidelberg/Universidad EAN (Colombia) en M. V. Escandell, J. Amenós y A. Ahern (eds.), Pragmática, Madrid, Akal, 2019 Introducción La pragmática se ocupa del "estudio de cómo las propiedades lingüísticas y los factores contextuales interactúan en la interpretación de los enunciados" (Noveck/Sperber 2004: 1, la traducción es nuestra). Para describir dicha interacción y para poder formular los principios de la comunicación lingüística el investigador puede emplear sus propias intuiciones y la introspección, pero habitualmente se basa en observaciones, a menudo obtenidas a partir de estudios de corpus (Gries 2009, McEnery/Hardie 2011). Este modo de hacer pragmática se vincula primariamente a la dimensión sígnica de un fenómeno del hablar al establecer correspondencias entre unidades y estructuras de una o más lenguas (= signos) y sus usos discursivos. Los estudios experimentales también aportan datos que permiten confirmar, revisar o rechazar hipótesis acerca del funcionamiento de las unidades y las estructuras lingüísticas que se consideran en cada caso. Estos datos son, no obstante, distintos y complementarios de los obtenidos a partir de corpus (Guilquin/Gries 2009), pues aportan correlaciones entre propiedades de los signos durante el hablar y la actividad cognitiva que precisan su producción o su comprensión: pragmática basada en el método experimental nivel cognitivouniversal nivel de la lenguahistórico pragmática basada en el análisis de corpus nivel discursivoindividual Figura 1. La investigación empírica sobre el discurso 2

abstractIn one type of Relative Clause Extraposition (RCE) in English, a subject-modifying relative clause occurs in a displaced position following the matrix VP, as in: Some options were considered that allow for more flexibility. Although RCE incurs a discontinuous dependency and is relatively infrequent in discourse, previous corpus and acceptability judgment studies have shown that speakers prefer RCE over adjacent ordering when the RC is long in relation to the VP, the subject NP is indefinite, and the main verb is passive/presentative (Francis, 2010; Francis & Michaelis, 2014; Walker, 2013). The current study is the first to relate these conditional preferences to online measures of production. For a spoken production task that required speakers to construct sentences based on visual cues, results showed that the same factors that modulate choice of structure – VP length, RC length, and definiteness of the subject NP – also modulate voice initiation time. That is, when the sen...

Psycholinguistic methods hold great promise for experimental philosophy. Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments proceed from verbal descriptions of possible cases. Many relevant intuitions and conclusions are driven by spontaneous inferences about what else must also be true in the cases described. Such inferences are continually made in language comprehension and production. This chapter explains how methods from psycholinguistics can be employed to study such routine automatic inferences, with a view to assessing intuitions and reconstructing arguments. We demonstrate how plausibility ratings, pupillometry, and reading time measurements can be used to examine hypotheses about automatic inferences in speech and text comprehension. Two experiments on inferences from polysemous (perception-)verbs provide evidence of a potentially consequential 'salience bias'. Findings help assess intuitions about unusual cases and analyse a philosophical paradox ('argument from hallucination'). The paper thus illustrates how we can adapt psycholinguistic methods for philosophical purposes and demonstrates the methods' philosophical usefulness.

Важнейшая проблема левого искусства в эпоху исторического и нео-авангарда – отношение между методом и материалом, флагрантность которого необходимо было сохранить, организовав его с помощью конструктивного принципа. Если в Советской России 1920-х гг., эта задача наиболее оригинально решалась в литературе факта, опиравшейся на демократические медиа и сочетавшей «объективную фиксацию» действительных фактов с их «диалектическим монтажом», то во франкофонной культуре один из самых экстравагантных вариантов синтеза предложил Марсель Дюшан в своей технике реди-мейда, также основанной на выборе реальных объектов с их последующим «вмонтированием» в оптику художника. Несмотря на очевидные различия между широкой сетью рабкоров и селькоров, рапортующих о социалистическом строительстве на местах, и эстетом-одиночкой, выставляющим в 1917 писсуар в нью-йоркской галерее, теми, и другим двигал один и тот же авангардный импульс выявления и расшатывания институционального субстрата современного искусства/литературы и расширения привилегии авторства на аудиторию – литературы, создаваемой читателями, и картин, создаваемых зрителями («les regardeurs, qui font les tableaux»). Кроме схожего направления удара по институту искусства (отрицание притязаний на индивидуальную креативность), теоретиков «фактографии» и «редимейда» объединяло и само стремление к созданию неорганического произведения искусства и смешанная прагматическая стратегия - не стремиться произвести «целостное впечатление», но сохранять возможность самостоятельной семантической активности элементов и оставлять незамаскированным сам факт художественной манипуляции.

Политизация поля искусства: исторические версии, теоретические подходы, эстетическая специфика. Под ред. Т. А. Круглова, Ж. Сапиро. Екатеринбург: Кабинетный ученый, 2015.
В коллективную монографию вошли статьи, написанные на основе докладов конференции «Трансформации левой идеи в художественной культуре СССР и Франции» и «Политизация поля искусства: советские художники в поисках идентичности» (руководители — профессор Т. А. Круглова, Екатеринбург, и профессор Ж. Сапиро, Париж). 312 стр. ISBN 978-5-7525-3078-4 (Кабинетный ученый)

Few works have addressed the processing of indirect requests in High-Functioning Autism (HFA), and results are conflicting. Some studies report HFA individuals' difficulties in indirect requests comprehension; others suggest that it might be preserved in HFA. Furthermore, the role of Theory of Mind in understanding indirect requests is an open issue. The goal of this work is twofold: first, assessing whether comprehension of indirect requests for information is preserved in HFA; second, exploring whether mind-reading skills predict this ability. We tested a group of (n = 14; 9-12 years) HFA children and two groups of younger (n = 19; 5-6 years) and older (n = 28; 9-12 years) typically developing (TD) children in a semi-structured task involving direct, indirect and highly indirect requests for information. Results suggested that HFA can understand indirect and highly indirect requests, as well as TD children. Yet, while Theory of Mind skills seem to enhance older TD children und...

This paper investigates the question whether implicative verbs should be considered as soft presupposition triggers, i.e., as triggers activating optional context repairs. I present the results of an experiment in which test subjects were asked to read short dialogues containing either presupposition triggers or conversational implicatures and, next, answer the questions regarding the information communicated on the level of presupposition or implicatures, respectively. The results of within-subject ANOVA show that presuppositions activated by the use of implicative verbs are significantly less accessible and illicit significantly longer response times than presuppositions activated by the use of hard triggers, suggesting that they can be classified as soft presupposition triggers. The obtained results also show that presuppositions activated by the use of different triggers are heterogenous in regards to the accessibility of information.

According to the Common Ground account proposed by , speakers involved in a verbal interaction have a number of different propositional attitudes towards their presuppositions. In this paper we propose an experimental study aimed at estimating the psychological plausibility of the Stalnakerian model. In particular, the goal of our experiment is to evaluate variations in accepting as appropriate a sentence that triggers a presupposition, where different attitudes are taken towards the presupposition required. The study conducted suggests that if a speaker has the attitude of belief towards the content of a presupposition, she may evaluate an utterance as more appropriate in a shorter time than in cases where she holds an attitude of presumption or of assumption. Therefore, data collected support the psychological soundness of what might be considered the main, but also most debated, theory of presupposition on the market.

Three eye movement experiments investigated the interaction between contextual and lexical focus cues during reading. Context was used to focus on either the indirect or direct object of a double object construction, which was followed by a remnant continuation that formed either a congruous or incongruous contrast with the contextually focused object. Experiment 1 demonstrated that remnants were more difficult to process when incongruous with the contextually focused constituent, indicating that context was effective in specifying focus. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated the interaction between context and lexical focus arising from the particle "only" which specifies focus on the subsequent adjacent element. When "only" preceded both objects (Experiment 2), the conflict between lexical and contextual focus cues disrupted processing of the remnant element and was resolved in favour of the contextually focused element. However, when "only" was placed between both objects (Experiment 3), cue-conflict disrupted processing earlier in the sentence but did not appear to be fully resolved during on-line sentence processing. These findings reveal that the interplay between contextual and lexical cues to focus is important for establishing focus structure during on-line sentence processing.

C. S. Peirce is often credited as a forerunner of the verificationist theory of meaning. In his early pragmatist papers, Peirce did say that if we want to make our ideas clear(er), then we should look downstream to their actual and future effects. For many who work in philosophy of mind, this is enough to endorse functionalism and dismiss the whole topic of qualia. It complexifies matters, however, to consider that the term qualia was introduced by the founder of pragmatism himself. Peirce was adamant that only triadic relations can support language and cognition. Even so, he insisted on purely logical grounds that, when we analyze triadic signs all the way, we are left with a qualitative residue he called Firstness. Such an isolated relatum could never be studied experimentally. Yet, given that this primitive state can be confirmed by means of a formal or prescissive distinction, I believe the Peircean account can do justice to many of the intuitions that generate the so-called hard problem of consciousness. My goal, then, is to show that Peirce's semiotic commitment to qualia is compatible with his foundational statements about pragmatism.

The FIASCO system implements a machine-learning approach for the automatic removal of boilerplate (navigation bars, link lists, page headers and footers, etc.) from Web pages in order to make them available as a clean and useful corpus for linguistic purposes. The system parses an HTML document into a DOM tree representation and identifies a set of disjoint subtrees that correspond to text blocks, headers or list items. Each block is then represented as a vector of linguistic, structural and visual features. A support vector ...

This paper investigates the question whether implicative verbs should be considered soft presupposition triggers, understood as triggers that activate optional context repair. I present the experiment in which test subjects were asked to read short dialogues containing either presupposition trigger or conversational implicature and answer the questions regarding the information communicated on the level of presupposition or implicature. Results of within-subject ANOVA show that presuppositions activated by the use of implicative verbs are significantly less accessible and illicit significantly longer response times than presuppositions activated by the use of hard triggers, suggesting that they can be classified as soft presupposition triggers. Results also show that presupposition activated by the use of different triggers are heterogenous in regards to the accessibility of information.

There is a debate in linguistics regarding the meaning and interpretation of number terms (NT) used in natural languages. Within this framework, compositionality should be considered in order to evaluate the potential interpretations of a number term. From this perspective, it is essential to enrich the theoretical arguments with empirical evidence so as to contribute to the linguistic and psycholinguistic debate about the semantics of number terms. We carried out an experimental study that aims to empirically test the main arguments of two different perspectives related to the semantics of NT – the so – called naïve view that supports an exact semantics of NT, and the contextualist view that promotes an underspecified semantics of NT. This experiment also tries to systematically take into account several linguistic contexts that can affect their interpretation. Generally speaking, we found evidence suggesting that the exact interpretation of number terms is the most accessible one to speakers and also that compositionality is indeed a key factor that significantly affects the interpretation process.

In learning language, children have to acquire not only words and constructions, but also the ability to make inferences about a speaker's intended meaning. For instance, if in answer to the question, 'what did you put in the bag?', the speaker says, 'I put in a book', then the hearer infers that the speaker put in only a book, by assuming that the speaker is informative. On a Gricean approach to pragmatics, this implicated meaning -a quantity implicature -involves reasoning about the speaker's epistemic state. This thesis examines children's development of implicature understanding. It seeks to address the question of what the relationship is in development between quantity, relevance and manner implicatures; whether word learning by exclusion is a pragmatic forerunner to implicature, or based on a lexical heuristic; and whether reasoning about the speaker's epistemic state is part of children's pragmatic competence. This thesis contributes to research in experimental and developmental pragmatics by broadening the focus of investigation to include different types of implicatures, the relationship between them, and the contribution of other aspects of children's development, including structural language knowledge. It makes the novel comparison of word learning by exclusion with a clearly pragmatic skill -implicatures -and opens an investigation of manner implicatures in development. It also presents new findings suggesting that children's early competence with quantity implicatures in simple communicative situations belies their ongoing development in more complex ones, particularly where the speaker's epistemic state is at stake.

Experimental philosophy's 'sources project' seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions which help us assess their evidentiary value. This paper develops a psycholinguistic explanation of intuitions prompted by brief philosophical case-descriptions. For proof of concept, we target intuitions underlying a classic paradox about perception ('argument from hallucination'). We trace them to stereotype-driven inferences automatically executed in verb comprehension. We employ a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to show that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are made from less salient uses of the verb " to see ". This yields a debunking explanation which resolves the philosophical paradox.

One of the deficits associated with schizophrenia is the language disorder. While classic analyses of the problem have focused on the traditional linguistic levels (Chaika 1974; Covington et al. 2005), schizophrenic patients have been demonstrated to exhibit deficits in comprehending nonliteral forms of discourse (Brüne and Bodenstein 2004; Sponheim et al. 2003; Rapp et al. 2008). The aim of the present study is to analyse irony comprehension in paranoid schizophrenia. Ten male patients were asked to choose the most appropriate interpretations of ironic and literal scenarios. They chose literal paraphrases significantly more often than a matched control group, which points to the existence of a figurative language comprehension deficit in schizophrenia.

Keywords: schizophrenia, irony comprehension, figurative language

One focus of work on the processing of linguistic meaning has been the relative processing speed of different aspects of meaning. While much early work has focused on implicatures in comparison to literal asserted content (e.g., , among many others), the present paper extends recent efforts to experimentally investigate another aspect of meaning, namely presuppositions. It investigates the triggers again and stop using the visual world eye tracking paradigm, and provides evidence for rapid processing of presupposed content. Our study finds no difference in timing for the two triggers, which is of theoretical relevance given proposals for distinguishing classes of triggers, such as hard vs. soft (Abusch 2010). Whatever differences between these there may be are apparently not affecting the online processing time-course. As a further comparison, again was also compared to twice, which expresses essentially the same meaning without a presupposition. Shifts in eye movements for these two cases also appear to be entirely on par, further supporting the notion that presupposed and asserted content are available in parallel early on in online processing. for their assistance with experiment implementation and data collection, and to Dorothy Ahn for providing the visual stimuli. I'd also like to acknowledge my collaborators on various related projects, including Sonja Tiemann, Jacopo Romoli, and Cory Bill. I thank both them and audiences at SALT 24 and CUNY 27 for highly useful discussions of issues related to the present paper.

While some studies indicate that ironic -- as opposed to literal -- readings of utterances take longer to process, others indicate that the two are processed at comparable speeds. We propose that mindreading processes are at least partly responsible for the mixed results as we present three experiments that include stories having a target utterance with either an Ironic or Literal reading. Experiment 1 replicates earlier findings (Spotorno et al., 2012) showing that ironic readings take longer than literal ones when fillers include decoys, stories that call for an ironic remark but present a banal utterance instead and thus diffuse participants’ expectations for irony. Starting with Experiment 2, decoys are removed leading to effects that are arguably revealing of Theory-of-Mind processes. One is an Early-Late effect, which occurs when ironic utterances are read as readily as literal ones in the second half of an experimental session, creating “mixed” results in the laboratory. In Experiment 3, we further added antecedents before a critical event so that, later, the target utterance would be echoing an explicitly stated thought and facilitate irony comprehension (Sperber & Wilson, 1981; Gibbs, 1986). Results reveal an Early-Late effect here, too. Further evidence of Theory of Mind activity follows from analyses of participants’ social skill subscale scores in the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001). Socially-inclined participants are more likely than the socially-disinclined to use a story’s negative-event to portend the arrival of an irony; in contrast, socially-disinclined participants appear more reactive than the socially inclined to explicit antecedents.

This contribution aims at offering a state of the art about experimental research on mechanisms for referential and relational coherence, pivotal for the construction of discourse in the interlocutors' aim to recover of a relevant assumption in communication. The construction of discourse is a cognitive 'activity' that consists in decoding linguistic material of utterances and performing a series of mental operations to recover a relevant interpretation in a communicative exchange. For that purpose, interlocutors put to use linguistic mechanisms directed at establishing 'referential coherence' and 'relational coherence' to achieve discourse 'connectedness'. The cognitive effects of these mechanisms in terms of their consequences for discourse processing and interpretation can be approached by means of experimentation. Doing so allows the researcher to enrich scientific findings as provided by linguistic description and observational studies, helps refining theories of human verbal communication and comes along with a strong transfer potential for applied endeavors.

Readers typically experience processing difficulty when they encounter a word that is anomalous within the local context, such as ‘The mouse picked up the dynamite...’. The research reported here demonstrates that by placing a sentence in a fictional scenario that is already well known to the reader (e.g., a Tom and Jerry cartoon, as a context for the example sentence above), the difficulty usually associated with these pragmatic anomalies can be imme- diately eliminated, as reflected in participants’ eye movement behaviour. This finding suggests that readers can rapidly integrate information from their common ground, specifically, their cultural knowledge, whilst interpreting incoming text, and provides further evidence that incoming words are immediately integrated within the global discourse.

Although there is increasing evidence to suggest that language is grounded in perception and action, the relationship between language and emotion is less well understood. We investigate the grounding of language in emotion using a novel approach that examines the relationship between the comprehension of a written discourse and the performance of affect-related motor actions (hand movements towards and away from the body). Results indicate that positively and negatively valenced words presented in context influence motor responses (Experiment 1), whilst valenced words presented in isolation do not (Experiment 3). Furthermore, whether discourse context indicates that an utterance should be interpreted literally or ironically can influence motor responding, suggesting that the grounding of language in emo- tional states can be influenced by discourse-level factors (Experiment 2). In addition, the finding of affect-related motor responses to certain forms of ironic language, but not to non-ironic control sentences, suggests that phrasing a message ironically may influence the emotional response that is elicited.

Little is known about the on-line evaluation of information relating to well-known story characters during text comprehension. For example, it is not clear in how much detail readers represent character-based information, and the time course over which this information is utilized during on-line language comprehension. We describe an event- related potential (ERP) study (Experiment 1) and an eye-tracking study (Experiment 2) investigating whether, and when, readers utilize their prior knowledge of a character in processing event information. Participants read materials in which an event was described that either did or did not fit with the character’s typical behavior. ERPs elicited by the critical word revealed an N400 effect when the action described did not fit with the character’s typical behavior. Results from early eye movement measures supported these findings, and later measures suggested that such violations were more easily accommodated for well-known fictional characters than real-world characters.