Pragmatic enrichment in language processing and development

The goal of language comprehension for humans is not just to decode the semantic content of sentences, but rather to grasp what speakers intend to communicate. To infer speaker meaning, listeners must at minimum assess whether and how the literal meaning of an utterance addresses a question under discussion in the conversation. In cases of implicature, where the speaker intends to communicate more than just the literal meaning, listeners must access additional relevant information in order to understand the intended contribution of the utterance. I argue that the primary challenge for inferring speaker meaning is in identifying and accessing this relevant contextual information. In this dissertation, I integrate evidence from several different types of implicature to argue that both adults and children are able to execute complex pragmatic inferences relatively efficiently, but encounter some difficulty finding what is relevant in context. I argue that the variability observed in processing costs associated with adults' computation of scalar implicatures can be better understood by examining how the critical contextual information is presented in the discourse context. I show that children's oft-cited hyper-literal interpretation style is limited to scalar quantifiers. Even 3-year-olds are adept at understanding indirect requests and "parenthetical" readings of belief reports. Their ability to infer speaker meanings is limited only by their relative inexperience in conversation and lack of world knowledge

Processing cost effects of atypicality inferences in a dual-task setup

Whether pragmatic inferences are cognitively more effortful than processing literal language has been a longstanding question in pragmatics. So far, experimental studies have exclusively tested generalized (scalar) implicatures. Current theories would predict that particularized implicatures should be cognitively effortful e however, this prediction has to date not been tested empirically. The present article contributes to the debate by investigating a specific type of particularized implicature, atypicality inferences, in a dualtask paradigm. In three experiments, we used either a non-linguistic (Experiment 1) or a linguistic (Experiments 2 and 3) secondary task, to modulate the amount of available cognitive resources. Our results show that the strength of pragmatic inferences is largely unaffected by the secondary task, which contrasts with prior predictions. We discuss the implications for traditional and modern accounts of pragmatic processing

Pragmatics and Semantics in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

This study examined scalar implicature to investigate semantic bases of pragmatic language impairment in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Scalar implicatures are inferences made by listeners, whereby they strengthen the weaker meaning of a term that can be represented on a scale (Grice, 1975; Horn, 1992). Scalar terms include: some/all; or/and; numerals. These inferences depend on understanding a speaker\u27s intent and having the cognitive skills necessary to process such information in real time. Informativeness is the value a listener places on having to derive an implicature and assumes that the listener perceives the speakers intentions. Cognitive effort includes the executive functions working memory, interference, and inhibition (Wilson & Sperber, 2004). Children with autism have difficulty with social language and appear to be insensitive to speaker\u27s intentions, therefore, they may have difficulty understanding scalar implicatures (Happé, 1993). In addition, because it is also believed that inferences place great demands on cognitive resources, children with impaired executive functions, as may be the case in autism, may have difficulty comprehending these sentences (Ozonoff, South, & Provencal, 2005). Method Subjects viewed 1 or 4 pictures while hearing sentences under manipulations of cognitive effect (informativeness level) and cognitive effort (processing costs). Cognitive effect was controlled by experiment (2) and cognitive effort was manipulated by varying stimulus onset asynchrony (3). Three participant groups were tested: seven 7-9 year-old children with autism, ten 7-9 year-old children with typical language development (TD), and 14 adults with a history of typical language. Performance on three comprehension tasks were compared: a yes/no picture-sentence judgment task, a two-talker picture-sentence judgment task, and a 4AFC picture-sentence matching task using a table-top eye tracker (Tobii TX300). To assess the role of executive functions on scalar comprehension participants also completed a computerized non-verbal task function of attention, interference, and response inhibition. Results Children, regardless of clinical presentation, did not perform as well as adults. Within weak scalars (some, or) children had the greatest difficulty when the target was or. Within the strong scalar group, and was more difficult than all. Children with poorer performance on the executive functions task tended to be younger and also had the poorest accuracy on the scalar implicature tasks. There were no group differences between TD and ASD children in the executive functions task. The three different scalar tasks revealed task effects on inference making in children. TD children were able to accept more implied semantic sentences as correct in the two-talker task compared to the yes/no task. When the stimulus onset asynchrony was set so that the visual preceded the audio stimulus by 750 ms, TD children also performed better. Children with ASD did not demonstrate these differences. The eye tracking data also revealed slower processing of correct responses for children with ASD. Overall children with ASD accepted implied semantic interpretations of the weak scalars some and or. However, the process in which they did so was different from that of TD children and adults, with more individual variation within the ASD group. Acknowledgements This research was supported by two grants from the National Institutes of Health: a pre-doctoral fellowship, 5F31DC013002, to Karece Lopez and a multi-year award, 5R01DC011041, to Richard Schwartz

Psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic investigations of scalar implicature

The present study examines the representation and composition of meaning in scalar implicatures. Scalar implicature is the phenomenon whereby the use of a less informative term (e.g., some) is inferred to mean the negation of a more informative term (e.g., to mean not all). The experiments reported here investigate how the processing of the implicature-based aspect of meaning (e.g., the interpretation of some as meaning not all) differs from other types of meaning processing, and how that aspect of meaning is initially realized. The first three experiments measure event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine whether inferential pragmatic aspects of meaning are processed using different mechanisms than lexical or combinatorial semantic aspects of meaning, and whether inferential aspects of meaning can be realized rapidly. Participants read infelicitous quantifiers for which the semantic meaning (at least one of) was correct with respect to the context but the pragmatic meaning (not all of) was not, compared to quantifiers for which the semantic meaning was inconsistent with the context and no additional pragmatic meaning is available. Across experiments, quantifiers that were pragmatically inconsistent but not semantically inconsistent with the context elicited a broadly distributed, sustained negative component. This sustained negativity contrasts with the N400 effect typically elicited by nouns that are incongruent with their context, suggesting that the recognition of scalar implicature errors elicits a qualitatively different ERP signature than the recognition of lexico-semantic errors. The effect was also distinct from the ERP response elicited by quantifiers that were semantically inconsistent with a context. The sustained negativity may reflect cancellation of the pragmatic inference and retrieval of the semantic meaning. This process was also found to be independent from lexico-semantic processing: the N400 elicited by lexico-semantic violations was not modulated by the presence of a pragmatic inconsistency. These findings suggest there is a dissociation between the mechanisms for processing combinatorial semantic meaning and those for inference-based pragmatic meaning, that inferential pragmatic meaning can be realized rapidly, and that the computation of meaning involves continuous negotiation between different aspects of meaning. The next set of experiments examined how scalar implicature-based meanings are realized initially. Default processing accounts assume that the interpretation of some of as meaning not all of is realized easily and automatically (regardless of context), whereas context-driven processing accounts assume that it is realized effortfully and only in certain contexts. In two experiments, participants' self-paced reading times were recorded as they read vignettes in which the context did or did not bias the participants to make a scalar inference (to interpret some of as meaning not all of). The reading times in the first experiment suggested that the realization of the inference was influenced by the context: reading times to a target word later in the vignette were facilitated in contexts in which the scalar inference should be realized but not in contexts where it should not be realized. Importantly, however, reading times did not provide evidence for processing cost at the time the inference is realized, contrary to the predictions of context-driven processing accounts. The results raise the question of why inferencing occurs only in certain contexts if it does not involve extra processing effort. In the subsequent experiment, reading times suggested that the inference may not have been realized when participants engaged in a secondary task that increased processing load. These results, together with the results of other recent experiments, suggest that inferencing may be effortless in certain contexts but effortful with other contexts, and not computed at all in still other contexts, depending on the strength of the bias created by the context. These findings may all be accountable for under a recently-proposed constraint-based processing model of scalar implicature

The pronoun interpretation problem in Italian complex predicates

This thesis explores the syntactic and pragmatic factors involved in the interpretation of clitic pronouns in Principle B contexts in both theoretical and acquisition perspective. The Pronoun Interpretation Problem, i.e. children’s apparent difficulty with the application of Principle B, defines a stage lasting up to about age 6: (1) Mama Beari is washing heri (50% correct at age 5;6) (2) Lo gnomoi lo*i lava (85% correct at age 4;8) Italian The gnome him.washes It is assumed that clitic pronouns like lo are exempted from interpretation problems because they can only be interpreted via binding. Romance children, however, show interpretation problems in complex sentences like (3): (3) La niñai lai ve bailar (64% correct at age 5;6) Sentences like the above, which involve Exceptional Case Marking, are the main focus of the present research. We maintain that (3) can only be explained if Principle B does not apply to these structures, as also proposed by Reinhart and Reuland’s (1993) and Reuland’s (2001) alternative binding theories. In order to explain (i) why clitics can only be interpreted via binding in simple sentences like (2) and (ii) why binding does not apply to (3), we draw on two fundamental assumptions: (i) binding effects in object cliticization are the output of the narrow syntactic derivation, specifically, of movement to the left edge of v*P; (ii) under a phase‐based model of syntactic derivations (Chomsky 2001), the binding domain is not the sentence, but the vP phase. We argue that the derivation in (3) contains an unbound occurrence of the pronoun, which allows children to covalue the matrix subject and the pronoun in pragmatics; such hypothesis receives support by our experimental finding that another complex predicate in Italian, causative faire‐par, triggers PIP. Ultimately, we suggest that the PIP can be ascribed to a unitary cause across languages, namely, the delayed pragmatic acquisition of local coreference

The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study

Carminati MN, Knoeferle P. The Processing of Emotional Sentences by Young and Older Adults: A Visual World Eye-movement Study. Presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language and Processing (AMLaP), Riva del Garda, Italy