Speakers

Intentionality and discrimination

Abstract: 

Does discrimination have to be intentional to qualify as such? How do people evaluate discriminatory side effects? And what insights can Gricean models of pragmatics and philosophy more broadly offer about discriminatory language use? After reviewing the state of the art in pragmatics and philosophy, we present the results of several experiments on ascriptions of intentionality for positive and negative discrimination.

Our talk is followed by a structured discussion on the synergies between the XPRAG and XPhi communites. 

Multi-Utterance Language Production as Foraging

Abstract: 

How do speakers plan complex descriptions and then execute those plans? In this work, we attempt to answer this question by asking subjects to describe complex visual scenes while simultaneously monitoring their eye movements. We posit that speakers begin planning by organizing the scene into meaningful clusters or groupings of objects centered around both physical and semantic distance. Speakers then describe the scene cluster by cluster, exploiting the content available at one cluster before moving on to another. To test these ideas, in a preregistered study 30 participants described 30 indoor and outdoor scenes while their eye movements and speech were recorded. Physical distance was calculated by identifying the centroid point of each object and then computing the Euclidean distance between centroid points for every object pair. Semantic distance was calculated using ConceptNet Numberbatch to obtain the semantic similarity between object labels. A clustering algorithm was then applied to establish the appropriate number of clusters per scene and to assign objects to each physical or semantic cluster. We observed that, consistent with our hypothesis, objects separated by shorter physical distances and objects that are semantically more similar were discussed in closer temporal proximity in the verbal descriptions. In addition, word productions that involved jumping from one predefined cluster to another took longer to initiate than those associated with the same cluster. We conclude that speakers solve the linearization problem by establishing physical and semantic clusters and exploiting the information contained at each one. This approach treats multi-utterance language production as a type of foraging behavior, where people balance exploration and exploitation by locating an object cluster, exploiting the contents of that cluster, and exploring the environment for new clusters once the current one is depleted. 

Quantity implicature and perspective-taking: insights from a novel task 

Abstract: 

There are several influential views on whether some form of theory of mind is required to derive pragmatic inferences. In this presentation I will share with you a new task that colleagues and I have designed where success depends on sensitivity to the pragmatic maxim of informativeness, to perspective-taking, or to both. Using this task with neurotypical children and neurotypical and autistic adults, we find that (i) some listeners reliably derive pragmatic inferences without taking into account the perspective of the speaker, and that (ii) their propensity to take into account the perspective of the speaker is affected by what they, the listeners, see from their perspective. I will use these findings to suggest that listeners may but need not represent the epistemic state of the actual speaker in order to derive implicatures, and the implementation of theory of mind is subject to metacognitive monitoring. I don't think that these findings speak in favour of any particular theory of implicature but I think that they do contribute towards a psycholinguistic model of implicature derivation. 

Lies, damned lies, and argumentative expressions of quantity

Abstract: 

Much of the research on how we express quantity, including numerical quantity, has focused on how speakers and hearers navigate situations where they are sharing information freely in order to achieve a common goal. However, both experience and research suggest that speakers are often adept at using quantity information to promote their own argumentative agenda. In this talk I discuss how we might attempt to model such usages and how hearers might attempt to avoid being misled.

Language acquisition meets Meaning First: Undercompression errors as evidence for conceptual primitives

Abstract: 

The Meaning First Approach (MFA) to grammar views language as an articulation of non-linguistic thought structures derived by three processes: structure preserving linearization, lexification, and compression via non-articulation of concepts when licensed.  We argue that a range of phenomena in child language can be explained within the MFA by the assumption that children differ from adults with respect to compression and, specifically, that they may undercompress in production. We focus on dependencies involving pronouns or gaps in relative clauses, multi-argument verbal concepts, and antonymic concepts involving negation or other opposites. We present extant evidence from the literature that children produce a type of commission errors that the MFA predicts as Undercompression Errors. We also summarize evidence that children’s comprehension ability provides evidence for the MFA prediction that decompression should be difficult, when there is no 1-to-1 correspondence.

On the most vs. more than half puzzle

Abstract: 

Quantifiers "most" and "more than half" are usually assumed to have the same truth-conditional meaning. Much work builds on this assumption in studying how the two quantifiers are mentally encoded and processed. However, there is mounting empirical evidence that those two quantifiers are interpreted differently. These findings are usually explained away via pragmatic effects. In the talk, I will present new data suggesting that the standard explanations may be wrong and that the difference between the two quantifiers may be semantic. 

Pragmatic development: What it’s about and how it gets started in infancy

Abstract: 

This talk will chart out pragmatic development with a focus on the experiences that allow infants to start using language for social communication. Following a working definition of pragmatics in the context of human ontogeny, we will trace the early steps of pragmatic development, from a dyadic phase, through to intentional triadic communication and early word use before briefly sketching out later developments that support adult-like communication at the sentential, multi-sentential and non-literal levels. Evidence will be provided from the study of individual differences, from randomised controlled trials and from deaf infants growing up in families with little prior experience of deafness (and who are thus at risk of reduced access to interaction). This will provide a summary of the first two chapters from a forthcoming book: Pragmatic Development: How children learn to use language for social communication. CUP.

Bridging pragmatics and language disorders: the case of schizophrenia

Abstract: 

Difficulties in what we now call pragmatics have been reported since the first half of the 20 th century, but it is only recently that people started to use a pragmatic lens to describe breakdowns in communicative skills. In this talk I will introduce the notion of pragmatic language disorders starting from its linguistic features and its neurobiological basis. Then, I

will focus on schizophrenia as one of the clinical conditions that exhibit the most marked pragmatic disruption. Going through a series of studies that describe the pragmatic profile and the concrete attitude of individuals with schizophrenia, I will touch upon key pragmatic issues such as the continuity view of figurative language and the role of Theory of Mind. Finally, I will propose a way to use the Gricean Maxims to improve pragmatic skills.

The money or the slime: Exclusivity implicatures in semi-cooperative contexts and their consequences for pragmatic accounts (Joint with Paul Marty, Jacopo Romoli and Yasu Sudo)

Abstract: 

Two widely discussed implications of typical uses of disjunction (‘A or B’) are ignorance implicatures (the speaker does not know if A is true or not, likewise B) and exclusivity implicatures (not [A and B]). According to standard pragmatic accounts (see Sauerland, 2004), both implications result from reasoning about a co-operative speaker who conforms to expectations about the utility of their utterance. Fox (2014) discusses a ‘guess the box’ game-show context in which a host (who is known to know the facts) provides a hint as to which box some prize money is in, ‘There is money in box A or B’. Fox argues that, in such contexts, the host is not normally co-operative, no ignorance implicatures arise, and yet an exclusivity implications do arise. This is taken as evidence against standard pragmatic accounts and for Fox’s favoured grammatical account of scalar implicatures. Here we develop an experimental paradigm due to Agyemang (2020) to test an alternative explanation of the game-show implications by controlling for features of the context that may give rise to exclusivity independently of standard pragmatic reasoning. Our results show that exclusivity implications are equally robust in both contexts. We take these results as motivation to re-think the standard pragmatic account of the reasoning associated with disjunction and show how a more nuanced description allows for exclusivity to arise in such contexts. Finally, we discuss how both this pragmatic account and Fox’s favoured grammatical account leave open a question as to why language users favour exclusivity when the situational evidence for that implication is quite equivocal.

Failures of Gricean reasoning and the role of stereotypes in the production of gender marking in French

Abstract: 

We partly replicate Malsburg et al. (2020)'s recent experiments investigating the relationship between speaker expectations, gender stereotypes and language use in English on a grammatical gender language: French. The results of our experiment show how the linguistic particularities of the English and French gender marking systems interact with speaker expectations and stereotypes to create different patterns of gender marking production. They also raise a puzzle for current theoretical and computational frameworks that formalize Gricean pragmatics, particularly those in which informativity (Gricean Quantity) is assumed to play a driving role in linguistic production.

REFERENCE

von der Malsburg, T., Poppels, T., and Levy, R. P. (2020). Implicit gender bias in linguis-tic descriptions for expected events: The cases of the 2016 US and 2017 UK election. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619890619

On the weak explanatory power of belief reasoning in pragmatics: What next?

Abstract:

Psycholinguists have expended considerable effort investigating how people adapt comprehension and production processes to the informational needs of their particular interlocutors, with lively debates emerging over the extent to which observed adaptations reflect the use of "common ground" or simpler heuristics. But it seems increasingly likely that such partner-specificity (whether a strong or weak version) explains only a tiny share of the variance in pragmatic phenomena which, by and large, seem to be driven by partner-independent representations and processes. Explaining pragmatic phenomena through the lens of partner independence thus becomes an important but utterly neglected agenda. In this talk I will present psycholinguistic evidence that justifies this agenda, along with some preliminary ideas about the way forward.

From 'we' to 'you' and 'me': the multiple-perspective theory of mental states in communication 

Abstract:

Inspired by early proposals in the philosophy of language, dominant accounts of language use posit a central role for mutual knowledge or shared information, either by directly positing a representation of common ground, or alternatively by appealing to general cognitive mechanisms that give rise to emergent coordinated representations. We challenge the widely-accepted focus on mutual knowledge – or any coordinated or shared representations, arguing that communication crucially depends on the asymmetries between conversational partners. In a novel theoretical proposal, we present a cognitive architecture where the representations of self and others are tracked and updated, and compared regularly during conversation. This proposal accounts for existing data, interfaces with findings from other cognitive domains, and makes novel, yet-to-be-tested empirical predictions. We term this new account the Multiple Perspectives Theory of the role of mental states in communication.

Literally “a jerk”. An experimental study of the semantics of negative expressives 

(joint work with Bianca Cepolaro and Isidora Stefanovic)

Abstract:

The literature on expressives (“bastard”, “jerk”, etc.) converges on two claims. First: to use expressives felicitously, the context doesn’t need to entail that the target of the expressive is bad, as long as the speaker feels negatively about them. Second: the content associated with expressives is speaker-oriented (“The speaker feels negatively about the target”) rather than target-oriented (“The target is bad/has done something wrong”). In this experimental study (a work in progress), we focus on predicative rather than referential uses of the Italian expressive “stronzo” (tr. “jerk”) and challenge both claims. Our results speak against the first claim: in the absence of information as to whether the target is bad, expressives are judged less acceptable than other negative evaluative terms (e.g., “unbearable”). They also challenge the second claim: using expressives is more acceptable in the target-oriented condition (“X is an underhanded and deceitful person”) than in the subjective or intersubjective conditions (“The speaker dislikes X”, “The speaker and others dislike X”).

Scalar implicatures: Inferences from neuroimaging

Abstract:

FMRI allows the detection of brain activations with a fairly good spatial resolution, and is used to determine cortical localization of cognitive processes. In this talk, I will present a set of fMRI experiments that show that we can use this technique not only for mapping linguistic functions to specific brain regions, but also to provide evidence that helps constrain linguistic theories regarding scalar implicatures. 

Similes and metaphors as scalar expressions of similarity: Bringing together two different literatures in experimental pragmatics research

Abstract:

One of the oldest debates in pragmatics (dating back to Aristotle!) discusses the relation between similes and metaphors (e.g., Wilma is like a princess vs Wilma is a princess). Going beyond figurative language, we have proposed that comparison and categorization statements are scalar expressions of similarity, with the stronger term conveying class inclusion (Rubio-Fernandez et al., 2017). Thus, ‘Betty is like a nurse’ would normally imply that Betty is not an actual nurse; otherwise the speaker should have uttered the corresponding categorization statement ‘Betty is a nurse’. In this talk, I will present the results of two recent experimental studies looking at the derivation of scalar implicatures when interpreting categorization and comparison statements. The first study investigated preschoolers’ pragmatic abilities in three experiments using similes and metaphors (Long et al., 2021). The periments confirm that including canonical ‘some’ and ‘all’ statements (e.g., ‘Some elephants have trunks’ vs ‘All elephants have trunks’) in sentence verification and sentence evaluation tasks increases the number of pragmatic responses to underinformative comparisons to a superordinate (e.g., ‘A banana is like a fruit’; Shukla et al., under review). We interpret these results as evidence that ‘some’ and ‘all’ sentences introduce an informativity bias in sentence verification and sentence evaluation tasks, affecting the degree to which these experimental tasks elicit pragmatic reasoning.

Discussing the future of Experimental Pragmatics

Meeting summary:

In March, we had a special edition of the Wine series discussing the future of Experimental Pragmatics. This meeting was organized into breakout rooms centered around the topics Acquisition, Clinical Pragmatics, Computational Pragmatics, Formal Pragmatics, Methodological Issues and Neuropragmatics. In many groups, there was a Zeitgeist pushing for more naturalistic experiments, production data and interactive paradigms. The community took a voting on topics we should address in the future, as represented in the word cloud to the right. The acquisition group was particularly creative and came up with the second word cloud displayed below (picture credit: Kristen Syrett). Both the Neuropragmatics and the Clinical Pragmatics groups highlighted how understudied Pragmatics is in these areas. We really enjoyed the whole event and got lots of positive feedback. For this reason, we name our event EPITHET "Everyone in pragmatics is talking happily and entertainingly tonight" (thanks to Hannah Rohde and Valentina Bambini for name suggestions!). Thanks to everyone for contributing! We plan to repeat this EPITHET format regularly. 

The Cabernet Sauvignon talks a lot: Real-time processing of metonymy

Abstract: 

Research from language comprehension suggests that metonymy is not a uniform phenomenon: certain metonymically used expressions exert processing costs (e.g., The Cabernet Sauvignon talks a lot), while others do not (e.g., The student read Shakespeare). In this talk, I will present data from eye tracking and event-related brain potential studies and I will argue that the different processing patterns are linked to differences in the representation and inferential demands underlying different types of metonymic uses. Meaning evolution and routinization may be the key to explaining the processing differences, where the emergence of cognitive routines facilitates processing in some cases, while other metonymic cases rely more strongly on inferences and the construction of ad hoc meanings.

Recording at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7mWMNpeh-g

Pragmatic strategies in autism

Abstract: 

In this talk, I will present a few recent studies on pragmatics in children and adults on the autism spectrum. Results of these studies confirm that autistic individuals may successfully engage in context-sensitive utterance interpretation. However, the pragmatic strategies they use prove inadequate in situations where the interpretation process requires genuinely adopting the speaker’s perspective. Such data from autism make it worth exploring a theoretical picture in which the same type of pragmatic output may be achieved, in certain situations at least, by processes at varying degrees of complexity.

Recording at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LESeAWPWwX0

False implicatures: Cooperation, commitment and plausible deniability

Abstract: 

Intended implicatures or pragmatic enrichments (e.g., “I’ve eaten some of the cookies”, meaning not all) can be false (when I’ve eaten all of them), but they probably do not quite have the same status as lies. Speakers can, of course, exploit this feature. This talk brings together findings from two projects – one with Giulio Dulcinati and the other in collaboration with Francesca Bonalumi, Johannes Mahr and Pauline Marie – investigating how hearers react to false implicatures. The first one looks at the perception of false implicatures in cooperative and uncooperative contexts. The second one explores how committed speakers are perceived to be to what they have expressed via an implicature or enrichment. It also probes whether a speaker can plausibly deny having intended them when they turn out to be false.

Recording at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxfbxA_u6i4&t=109s