Publications

Abstract

This study investigated the extent to which 3- and 4-year-old children may rely on associative memory representations to pass an unexpected-contents false-belief task. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds performed at chance in both a standard Smarties task and a modified version highlighting the secrecy of the contents of the tube. These results were interpreted as evidence that having to infer the answer to a false-belief question (without relying on memory representations) is generally difficult for preschool children. In Experiments 2a, 2b, and 2c, 3-year-olds were tested at 3-month intervals during their first year of preschool and showed better performance in a narrative version of the Smarties task (chance level) than in the standard version (below-chance level). These children performed even better in an associative version of the narrative task (above-chance level) where they could form a memory representation associating the protagonist with the expected contents of a box. The results of a true-belief control suggest that some of these children may have relied on their memory of the protagonist’s preference for the original contents of the box (rather than their understanding of what the protagonist was expecting to find inside). This suggests that when 3-year-olds passed the associative unexpected-contents task, some may have been keeping track of the protagonist’s initial preference and not only (or not necessarily) of the protagonist’s false belief. These results are interpreted in the light of current accounts of Theory of Mind development and failed replications of verbal false-belief tasks.

Abstract

The Violation-of-Expectation paradigm is a widespread paradigm in infancy research that relies on looking time as an index of surprise. This methodological review aims to increase the reliability of future VoE studies by proposing to standardize reporting practices in this literature. I review 15 VoE studies on false-belief reasoning, which used a variety of experimental parameters. An analysis of the distribution of p-values across experiments suggests an absence of p-hacking. However, there are potential concerns with the accuracy of their measures of infants’ attention, as well as with the lack of a consensus on the parameters that should be used to set up VoE studies. I propose that (i) future VoE studies ought to report not only looking times (as a measure of attention) but also looking-away times (as an equally important measure of distraction); (ii) VoE studies must offer theoretical justification for the parameters they use, and (iii) when parameters are selected through piloting, pilot data must be reported in order to understand how parameters were selected. Future VoE studies ought to maximize the accuracy of their measures of infants’ attention since the reliability of their results and the validity of their conclusions both depend on the accuracy of their measures.

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate, both in philosophy and psychology, as to whether people are able to automatically infer what others may know, or whether they can only derive belief inferences by deploying cognitive resources. Evidence from laboratory tasks, often involving false beliefs or visual-perspective taking, has suggested that belief inferences are cognitively costly, controlled processes. Here we suggest that in everyday conversation, belief reasoning is pervasive and therefore potentially automatic in some cases. To test this hypothesis, we conducted two pre-registered self-paced reading experiments (N1 = 91, N2 = 89). The results of these experiments showed that participants slowed down when a stranger commented ‘That greasy food is bad for your ulcer’ relative to conditions where a stranger commented on their own ulcer or a friend made either comment – none of which violated participants’ common-ground expectations. We conclude that Theory of Mind models need to account for belief reasoning in conversation as it is at the center of everyday social interaction

Abstract

A pragmatic account of referential communication is developed which presents an alternative to traditional Gricean accounts by focusing on cooperativeness and efficiency, rather than informativity. The results of four language-production experiments support the view that speakers can be cooperative when producing redundant adjectives, doing so more often when color modification could facilitate the listener's search for the referent in the visual display (Experiment 1a). By contrast, when the listener knew which shape was the target, speakers did not produce redundant color adjectives (Experiment 1b). English speakers used redundant color adjectives more often than Spanish speakers, suggesting that speakers are sensitive to the differential efficiency of prenominal and postnominal modification (Experiment 2). Speakers were also cooperative when using redundant size adjectives (Experiment 3). Overall, these results show how discriminability affects a speaker's choice of referential expression above and beyond considerations of informativity, supporting the view that redundant speakers can be cooperative.

Abstract

Gricean pragmatics has often been criticised for being implausible from a psychological point of view. This line of criticism is never backed up by empirical evidence, but more importantly, it ignores the fact that Grice never meant to advance a processing theory, in the first place. Taking our lead from Marr (1982), we distinguish between two levels of explanation: at the W-level, we are concerned with what agents do and why; at the H-level, we ask how agents do whatever it is they do. Whereas pragmatics is pitched at the W-level, processing theories are at the H-level. This is not to say that pragmatics has no implications for psychology at all, but it is to say that its implications are less direct than is often supposed.

Abstract

In standard Relevance Theory, hyperbole and metaphor are categorized together as loose uses of language, on a continuum with approximations, category extensions and other cases of loosening/broadening of meaning. Specifically, it is claimed that there are no interesting differences (in either interpretation or processing) between hyperbolic and metaphorical uses (Sperber & Wilson, 2008). In recent work, we have set out to provide a more fine-grained articulation of the similarities and differences between hyperbolic and metaphorical uses and their relation to literal uses (Carston & Wearing, 2011, 2014). We have defended the view that hyperbolic use involves a shift of magnitude along a dimension which is intrinsic to the encoded meaning of the hyperbole vehicle, while metaphor involves a multi-dimensional qualitative shift away from the encoded meaning of the metaphor vehicle. In this article, we present three experiments designed to test the predictions of this analysis, using a variety of tasks (paraphrase elicitation, self-paced reading and sentence verification). The results of the study support the view that hyperbolic and metaphorical interpretations, despite their commonalities as loose uses of language, are significantly different.

Abstract

Various accounts of metaphor interpretation propose that it involves constructing an ad hoc concept on the basis of the concept encoded by the metaphor vehicle (i.e. the expression used for conveying the metaphor). This paper discusses some of the differences between these theories and investigates their main empirical prediction: that metaphor interpretation involves enhancing properties of the metaphor vehicle that are relevant for interpretation, while suppressing those that are irrelevant. This hypothesis was tested in a cross-modal lexical priming study adapted from early studies on lexical ambiguity. The different patterns of suppression of irrelevant meanings observed in disambiguation studies and in the experiment on metaphor reported here are discussed in terms of differences between meaning selection and meaning construction.