Pragmatic implicatures—inferences that weak statements imply that stronger ones could not be used—are a popular case study of children’s pragmatic development. A growing literature suggests that children make implicatures under certain conditions, but their performance varies widely across tasks, and few datasets allow direct comparisons between implicature types. We designed a simple paradigm ...

Recently, much research has explored the role that nonverbal pointing behaviours play in children's early acquisition of language, for example during word learning. However, few researchers have considered the possibility that these behaviours may continue to play a role in language comprehension as children develop more sophisticated language skills. The present study investigates the role tha...

Co-speech gestures are an integral part of human face-to-face communication, but little is known about how pragmatic factors influence our comprehension of those gestures. The present study investigates how different types of recipients process iconic gestures in a triadic communicative situation. Participants (N = 32) took on the role of one of two recipients in a triad and were presented with...

Comprehension is determined by the content of memory. The verbalized concepts reflect the information that is in the focus of attention. Mental models of text must be formed in order to achieve coherence in language understanding. Constructing a mental model requires continual interaction between the text and the reader's linguistic, pragmatic, and world knowledge. In this article, a connection...

We present a series of three experiments on the comprehension of metonymy that sought to tease apart the role of contextual information and conventionality during the processing of expressions that require a transfer of meaning for proper interpretation. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read or listened to sentences including metonymic expressions and liter...

The main goal of the present study was to characterise the pragmatic abilities of French children with cerebral palsy through their understanding of irony and other people's mental states. We predicted that children with cerebral palsy would have difficulty understanding false-belief and ironic remarks, due to the executive dysfunction that accompanies the motor disorders of cerebral palsy. We ...

It is argued that genuinely subsentential phrases can be used to perform speech acts with truth conditions. Attempts to assimilate this phenomenon to syntactic ellipsis (sluicing, gapping, etc.) are discussed, and are rejected on the grounds that any implementation of this idea will involve a redundant level of representation in natural language that plays no role in the interpretation process,...

Deficits in pragmatic abilities have frequently been observed in patients with schizophrenia. The objective of the study was to investigate the relationship between pragmatic deficits, ToM deficits and executive dysfunctions in schizophrenia. A group of 42 schizophrenic patients and 42 healthy controls were assessed on irony task (one type of pragmatic language), two subcomponents of ToM (cogni...

Scalar implicature has served as a test case for exploring the relations between semantic and pragmatic processes during language comprehension. Most studies have used reaction time methods and the results have been variable. In these studies, we use the visual-world paradigm to investigate implicature. We recorded participants' eye movements during commands like "Point to the girl that has som...

Drawing upon sociocultural theory of Vygotsky, the current study aims to investigate the effect of dyadic interaction in mixed and matched level proficiency pairings on comprehension and production of request and apology speech acts. The participants were 125 EFL learners who were randomly assigned to control and experimental (interaction) groups. Based on their scores in the pretest including ...