Simple and Complex Extralinguistic Communicative Acts

The present research aims to investigate the distinction between simple and complex communicative acts in the context of extralinguistic communication. We propose that, within the same pragmatic phenomena studied which are standard communicative acts, deceit and irony a simple communicative act is easier to comprehend than a complex one. Our proposal is based on the different complexity of inferential processes involved in comprehending communicative acts. We provide empirical evidence in support to our hypothesis with an experiment on children aged 5;5 to 8;6 years. We consider our results as favoring a unitary model of communication, where ‘linguistic’ and ‘extralinguistic’ are similar expressive channels underlying the same cognitive faculty.