Where next for pragmatics and mind reading? A situation-based view (response to kissine)

Our commentary is mainly concerned with Kissine’s first argument, that mind-reading is not necessarily needed for pragmatics. We fully agree with Kissine, and we present (i) additional recent empirical evidence in support of this view, and (ii) a new model of pragmatics and mind-reading, based on the situation of language use rather than the type of pragmatic phenomenon that is instantiated. The last part of our commentary concerns the logical validity of Kissine’s argument, taking into account important concepts in autism research such as heterogeneity, equifinality, and neurodiversity, but also evaluating how relevant the empirical evidence from learning language from TV is to the debate on nativism vs constructivism. We conclude there is much to love (as regards pragmatics) and some to query (as regards the conclusions we can draw about nativism vs constructivism) in this timely and thought-provoking Perspective article

Recidivism prediction for criminal behaviour in young offenders

La reincidencia delictiva es una de las grandes preocupaciones de nuestra sociedad y la predicción de ésta, sobre todo en menores, conlleva una clara utilidad (Andrews y Bonta, 2006). Este estudio pretende analizar la consistencia interna del cuestionario IGI-J Inventario de Gestión e Intervención para jóvenes (Garrido et al., 2003), utilizado por el Equipo Técnico del Juzgado de Menores de Castellón, para determinar el riesgo de cada menor de reincidir, así como el porcentaje de clasificaciones correctas que predice el cuestionario, valorando su eficacia. Para ello, se han seleccionado 210 menores acusados de cometer algún tipo de delito o falta en Castellón, a los que se administró el citado cuestionario. Para valorar la reincidencia se realizó un seguimiento de los expedientes de los menores, durante un periodo de 6 meses, diferenciando a los menores que reincidían de los que no. Los resultados mostraron una buena consistencia interna de las escalas, así como un buen porcentaje de clasificación correcta de los casos en la predicción de la reincidencia del cuestionario.The criminal recidivism is one of the main worries of our society and its prediction is an important need in the research field, mainly in minors (Andrews & Bonta, 2006). This study tries to analyse the internal consistency of the IGI-J questionnaire (Garrido et al., 2003), used by the psychologists and social workers of the Juvenile Court in Castellón. This study tries to determine the risk of recidivism of each Young offender as well as the percentage of correct classification, assessing the questionnaire accuracy. In order to achieve this goal, 210 young offenders that have committed any kind of crime, were selected for the questionnaire. A follow up study of six months was carried out to assess the recidivism through their files, focusing in the ones who recidivate. Results showed good internal consistency of the scales, as well as a good percentage of accurate classification in predicting future criminal conduct.peerReviewe

Selective Pragmatic Impairment in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Indirect Requests Versus Irony

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often described as being characterised by a uniform pragmatic impairment. However, recent evidence suggests that some areas of pragmatic functioning are preserved. This study seeks to determine to which extent context-based derivation of non-linguistically encoded meaning is functional in ASD. We compare the performance of 24 adults with ASD, and matched neuro-typical adults in two act-out pragmatic tasks. The first task examines generation of indirect request interpretations, and the second the comprehension of irony. Intact contextual comprehension of indirect requests contrasts with marked difficulties in understanding irony. These results suggest that preserved pragmatics in ASD is limited to egocentric processing of context, which does not rely on assumptions about the speaker’s mental states.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe