Projects

Communicational Pragmatics in Infancy: Exploring the interplay between Theory of Mind, Turn Taking, and Conceptual Development

Young Researcher Grant (FK-17) of the National Research, Development and Innovation Office of Hungary, together with Lilla Magyari, PhD (2017-2023)

The main goal of our research project is to explore the development of pragmatic and communicative skills in infancy, with a special emphasis on the interplay between early mentalistic and linguistic abilities, and their gradual transformation into sophisticated and efficient language use. We apply a novel approach by combining neuroscientific methods (EEG) and eye-tracking to better understand two key aspects of infants’ communicational expectations and linguistic predictions. The first is the development of conversational turn-taking: Infants seem to be in possession of complex predictive mechanisms necessary for the remarkably swift and fast switches between conversational roles, but only a handful of studies have explored it sofar. The second thread deals with how communicational expectations are informed by Theory of Mind representations and linguistic prediction. We want to explore if belief states that are attributed during linguistic communication are semantic and concern types, or if they are more local and concern tokens, and if they are modulated by ostensive communicative cues. Our research could illuminate whether infants have conceptual meta-representations, or a more situational understanding of the (false) beliefs of communicative partners. This project could show that the communicative value of speech seems to be evident for infants from very early on, and that they take into account communicative gestures in their semantic representations.