Publications

Abstract

It has been generally assumed in the Theory of Mind literature of the past 30 years that young children fail standard false-belief tasks because they attribute their own knowledge to the protagonist (what Leslie and colleagues called a “true-belief default”). Contrary to the traditional view, we have recently proposed that the children's bias is task induced. This alternative view was supported by studies showing that 3 year olds are able to pass a false-belief task that allows them to focus on the protagonist, without drawing their attention to the target object in the test phase. For a more accurate comparison of these two accounts, the present study tested the true-belief default with adults. Four experiments measuring eye movements and response inhibition revealed that (a) adults do not have an automatic tendency to respond to the false-belief question according to their own knowledge and (b) the true-belief response need not be inhibited in order to correctly predict the protagonist's actions. The positive results observed in the control conditions confirm the accuracy of the various measures used. I conclude that the results of this study undermine the true-belief default view and those models that posit mechanisms of response inhibition in false-belief reasoning. Alternatively, the present study with adults and recent studies with children suggest that participants' focus of attention in false-belief tasks may be key to their performance.

Abstract

In standard Theory of Mind tasks, such as the Sally-Anne, children have to predict the behaviour of a mistaken character, which requires attributing the character a false belief. Hundreds of developmental studies in the last 30 years have shown that children under 4 fail standard false-belief tasks. However, recent studies have revealed that bilingual children and adults outperform their monolingual peers in this type of tasks. Bilinguals’ better performance in false-belief tasks has generally been interpreted as a result of their better inhibitory control; that is, bilinguals are allegedly better than monolinguals at inhibiting the erroneous response to the false-belief question. In this review, I challenge the received view and argue instead that bilinguals’ better false-belief performance results from more effective attention management. This challenge ties in with two independent lines of research: on the one hand, recent studies on the role of attentional processes in false-belief tasks with monolingual children and adults; and on the other, current research on bilinguals’ performance in different Executive Function tasks. The review closes with an exploratory discussion of further benefits of bilingual cognition to Theory of Mind development and pragmatics, which may be independent from Executive Function.

Abstract

Categorisation models of metaphor interpretation are based on the premiss that categorisation statements (e.g., ‘Wilma is a nurse’) and comparison statements (e.g., ‘Betty is like a nurse’) are fundamentally different types of assertion. Against this assumption, we argue that the difference is merely a quantitative one: ‘x is a y’ unilaterally entails ‘x is like a y’, and therefore the latter is merely weaker than the former. Moreover, if ‘x is like a y’ licenses the inference that x is not a y, then that inference is a scalar implicature. We defend these claims partly on theoretical grounds and partly on the basis of experimental evidence. A suite of experiments indicates both that ‘x is a y’ unilaterally entails that x is like a y, and that in several respects the non-y inference behaves exactly as one should expect from a scalar implicature. We discuss the implications of our view of categorisation and comparison statements for categorisation models of metaphor interpretation.

Abstract

Over two decades, the director task has increasingly been employed as a test of the use of Theory of Mind in communication, first in psycholinguistics and more recently in social cognition research. A new version of this task was designed to test two independent hypotheses. First, optimal performance in the director task, as established by the standard metrics of interference, is possible by using selective attention alone, and not necessarily Theory of Mind. Second, pragmatic measures of Theory-of-Mind use can reveal that people actively represent the director’s mental states, contrary to recent claims that they only use domain-general cognitive processes to perform this task. The results of this study support both hypotheses and provide a new interactive paradigm to reliably test Theory-of-Mind use in referential communication.

Abstract

Carston (2010) proposes that metaphors can be processed via two different routes. In line with the standard Relevance-Theoretic account of loose use, single metaphors are interpreted by a local pragmatic process of meaning adjustment, resulting in the construction of an ad hoc concept. In extended metaphorical passages, by contrast, the reader switches to a second processing mode because the various semantic associates in the passage are mutually reinforcing, which makes the literal meaning highly activated relative to possible meaning adjustments. In the second processing mode the literal meaning of the whole passage is metarepresented and entertained as an ‘imaginary world’ and the intended figurative implications are derived later in processing. The results of three experiments comparing the interpretation of the same target expressions across literal, single-metaphorical and extended-metaphorical contexts, using self-paced reading (Experiment 1), eye-tracking during natural reading (Experiment 2) and cued recall (Experiment 3), offered initial support to Carston's distinction between the processing of single and extended metaphors. We end with a comparison between extended metaphors and allegories, and make a call for further theoretical and experimental work to increase our understanding of the similarities and differences between the interpretation and processing of different figurative uses, single and extended.

Abstract

Color adjectives tend to be used redundantly in referential communication. I propose that redundant color adjectives (RCAs) are often intended to exploit a color contrast in the visual context and hence facilitate object identification, despite not being necessary to establish unique reference. Two language-production experiments investigated two types of factors that may affect the use of RCAs: factors related to the efficiency of color in the visual context and factors related to the semantic category of the noun. The results of Experiment 1 confirmed that people produce RCAs when color may facilitate object recognition; e.g., they do so more often in polychrome displays than in monochrome displays, and more often in English (pre-nominal position) than in Spanish (post-nominal position). RCAs are also used when color is a central property of the object category; e.g., people referred to the color of clothes more often than to the color of geometrical figures (Experiment 1), and they overspecified atypical colors more often than variable and stereotypical colors (Experiment 2). These results are relevant for pragmatic models of referential communication based on Gricean pragmatics and informativeness. An alternative analysis is proposed, which focuses on the efficiency and pertinence of color in a given referential situation.

Abstract

This study investigates the development of two cognitive abilities that are involved in metaphor comprehension: implicit analogical reasoning and assigning an unconventional label to a familiar entity (as in Romeo’s ‘Juliet is the sun’). We presented 3- and 4-year-old children with literal object-requests in a pretense setting (e.g., ‘Give me the train with the hat’). Both age-groups succeeded in a baseline condition that used building blocks as props (e.g., placed either on the front or the rear of a train engine) and only required spatial analogical reasoning to interpret the referential expression. Both age-groups performed significantly worse in the critical condition, which used familiar objects as props (e.g., small dogs as pretend hats) and required both implicit analogical reasoning and assigning second labels. Only the 4-year olds succeeded in this condition. These results offer a new perspective on young children’s difficulties with metaphor comprehension in the preschool years.

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.