It has been thought that during conversation, the effect of the history of usage of an expression on comprehension depends on common ground. We tracked listeners’ eye movements during a referential communication task in which they received instructions from two different speakers who described a referent either consistently or inconsistently with a previous description. We also manipulated cogn...

Inferences are mental representations, formed through the interaction between explicit linguistic information and an individual's world knowledge. It is well known that individuals with brain damage in the right hemisphere (RH) often fail on this task and that schooling may be a variable affecting this. Objective To compare the effect of schooling on an inference comprehension task based on p...

Several subjects with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) show communicative and pragmatic problems. In this study, we suggested that mentalistic comprehension tasks would help us to find a deteriorated pragmatic profile among the population with SLI. To achieve this goal, a group of participants with conventional SLI (n=11) was compared to a group of SLI with more pragmatic problems (n=9) and t...

How to make sure that one's utterances are understood as intended when not facing each other? In order to convey communicative intentions, in digital communication emoticons and pragmatic cues are frequently used. Such cueing becomes even more crucial for implied interpretations (e.g., irony) that cannot be understood literally, but require extra information. Sentences, such as 'That's fantasti...

This paper is about the cognitive foundations of pragmatic theories. Besides the fact that the usual appropriateness conditions for speech acts, which are given in cognitive terms, such as S knows/believes/wants ... (that) p , require empirical investigation, a sound theory of pragmatics must also explain how certain utterances in certain contexts are actually understood as certain speech acts....

OBJECTIVE To investigate theory of mind and the understanding of nonliteral language in patients with Tourette syndrome (TS). BACKGROUND In TS, striatal dysfunction could affect the functioning of the frontal cortex. Changes in frontal functioning could lead to impairments in theory of mind: the understanding of mental states, such as beliefs, emotions, and intentions. Poor understanding of a...

This paper aims to verify the efficacy of Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment (CPT), a new remediation training for the improvement of the communicative-pragmatic abilities, in patients with schizophrenia. The CPT program is made up of 20 group sessions, focused on a number of communication modalities, i.e., linguistic, extralinguistic and paralinguistic, theory of mind (ToM) and other cognitive func...

This paper discusses a developmental paradox, namely that children’s performance in language production sometimes exceeds their performance in language comprehension. This yields a puzzle for most theories of language acquisition. If a child produces a linguistic form correctly, this is considered to be evidence that the child possesses the relevant grammatical knowledge. However, if the child ...