Publications

Abstract

Pragmatic phenomena are characterized by extreme variability, which makes it difficult to draw sound generalizations about the role of social cognition in pragmatic language by and large. I introduce cultural evolutionary pragmatics as a new framework for the study of the interdependence between language and social cognition, and point at the study of common-ground management across languages and ages as a way to test the reliance of pragmatic language on social cognition. I illustrate this new research line with three experiments on article use by second language speakers, whose mother tongue lacks articles. These L2 speakers are known to find article use challenging and it is often argued that their difficulties stem from articles being pragmatically redundant. Contrary to this view, the results of this exploratory study support the view that proficient article use requires automatizing basic socio-cognitive processes, offering a window into the interdependence between language and social cognition.

Abstract

How might social cognition help us communicate through language? At what levels does this interaction occur? In classical views, social cognition is independent of language, and integrating the two can be slow, effortful, and error-prone. But new research into word level processes reveals that communication
is brimming with social micro-processes that happen in real time, guiding even the simplest choices like how we use adjectives, articles, and demonstratives. We interpret these findings in the context of advances in theoretical models of social cognition and propose a Communicative Mind-Tracking
framework, where social micro-processes aren’t a secondary process in how we use language—they are fundamental to how communication works.

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

Bilingualism can have widespread cognitive effects. In this article we investigate whether bilingualism might have an effect on adults' abilities to reason about other people's beliefs. In particular, we tested whether bilingual adults might have an advantage over monolingual adults in false-belief reasoning analogous to the advantage that has been observed with bilingual children. Using a traditional false-belief task coupled with an eye-tracking technique, we found that adults in general suffer interference from their own perspective when reasoning about other people's beliefs. However, bilinguals are reliably less susceptible to this egocentric bias than are monolinguals. Moreover, performance on the false-belief task significantly correlated with performance on an executive control task. We argue that bilinguals' early sociolinguistic sensitivity and enhanced executive control may account for their advantage in false-belief reasoning.