Language comprehension is more than a process of decoding the literal meaning of a speaker's utterance. Instead, by making the assumption that speakers choose their words to be informative in context, listeners routinely make pragmatic inferences that go beyond the linguistic data. If language learners make these same assumptions, they should be able to infer word meanings in otherwise ambiguou...

Previous studies on children’s pragmatic abilities have tended to focus on just one pragmatic phenomenon and one expressive means at a time, mainly concentrating on comprehension, and overlooking the production side. We assessed both comprehension and production in relation to several pragmatic phenomena (simple and complex standard communication acts, irony, and deceit) and several expressive ...

In current approaches to pragmatic reasoning the comprehension and production of referring expressions is modeled as a result of the interlocutors’ mutual perspective-taking under the additional assumption that speakers try to minimize their articulatory effort or production cost. The latter assumption is usually not tested and instead built into the experimental tasks of referential language g...

Second or foreign language (L2) learners’ development of interlanguage pragmatic (ILP) competence to understand and properly interpret utterances under certain social and cultural circumstances plays a pivotal role in the achievement of communicative competence. The current study was designed to explore the effects of synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) and asynchronous com...

When the message of a speaker goes beyond the literal or logical meaning of the sentences used, a pragmatic inference is required to understand the complete meaning of an utterance. Here we study one example of pragmatic inference, called scalar implicature. Such an inference is required when a weaker term "some" is used in a sentence like "Some of the students passed the exam" because the spea...

PURPOSE To investigate complaints commonly reported by parents of children with language disorders. In addition, we have analyzed the conditions of verbal production and comprehension of these children. METHODS The sample comprised 55 children of both genders with ages between 2 and 12 years old. The complaints reported by their families at the beginning of therapeutic intervention were analy...

the necessity of conducting more studies addressing the development of pragmatic profciency and strong pragmatic awareness for english language learners has made the role of instruction and feedback in teaching pragmatic knowledge of utmost importance. the present study evaluates the relative effectiveness of four types of instruction for teaching some pragmatic markers including topic change m...

Pragmatically related abilities were studied in three clinical groups of children from 5 to 11 years of age; children with cerebral palsy (CP; n=10), children with spina bifida and hydrocephalus (SBH; n=10) and children with pragmatic language impairment (PLI; n=10), in order to explore pragmatic abilities within each group. A range of pragmatic, linguistic and cognitive assessments were perfor...

Specific language impairment (SLI) has traditionally been characterized as a deficit of structural language (specifically grammar), with relative strengths in pragmatics. In this study, comprehensive assessment of production, comprehension, and metalinguistic judgment of referring expressions revealed that children with SLI have weaknesses in both structural and pragmatic language skills relati...

Many schizophrenic patients are reported to have impaired theory-of-mind (ToM) and/or formal thought disorder and as these terms will be referred to throughout the research it is important to briefly clarify their meanings. The ability to make appropriate inferences about other people's thoughts when the objective facts do not allow these thoughts to be directly understood is referred to as the...