Beyond Truth and Falsehood

"Science and art, two areas that started being separated deliberately and consistently on the threshold of modernism, were brought closer together again in postmodernism – thanks to the humanities and social sciences. However, this growing closeness was not a simple reversal of the situation in which the split had occurred; the rules were different, the cause was different, and the objective was different. The perception of science and the arts as areas of different kinds of cultural practice appeared prominently in the thinking of Descartes, whose argument in Discourse on Method sought to empower science, to turn it into a separate area of human activity and to indicate the rules according to which scientific, i.e. cognitive, thinking can be distinguished from artistic, i.e. creative, thinking (Descartes, 1980)." [...] (fragm.

Editorial Remarks: Beyond Literal Meaning. Metaphors

Following up on the previous special issue of Psychology of Language and Communication, devoted to irony, the current one concerns metaphors - another major form of non-literal language. The authors of the presented papers examine metaphor use and understanding in a wide variety of contexts, both in adult and child, as well as normal and abnormal populations. The result is a comprehensive survey of the current state of research, which opens further avenues of potentially fruitful inquiry

How do preschool children justify the use of figurative language. Data from research with irony comprehension task

Celem opisanego badania było sprawdzenie, jak dzieci w wieku przedszkolnym uzasadniają stosowanie wypowiedzi ironicznych. W Zadaniu Rozumienia Ironii (ZRI), przystosowanym do badań małych dzieci, proszono osoby badane o wyjaśnienie użycia sześciu przykładów ironii werbalnej. Przebadano 231 cztero- (N = 77), pięcio- (N = 89) i sześciolatków (N = 65). Badania ujawniły, że wraz z wiekiem dzieci coraz częściej wskazują na dualność znaczenia wypowiedzi ironicznych. Dzieci młodsze poprzestają na zauważeniu rozbieżności znaczenia dosłownego i zamierzonego, podczas gdy sześciolatki odwołują się także do stanów wewnętrznych bohatera historyjki obrazkowej bądź wprowadzają ciekawe uzasadnienia metajęzykowe.The aim of the described study was to check how preschool children justify using ironic statements. In the Irony Comprehension Task adopted for examining young children, the participants were asked to explain the use of six examples of verbal irony. There were 231 participants – 77 four-year-olds, 89 five-year-olds and 65 six-year-olds. The data revealed that with increasing age, children are more likely to indicate the duality of ironic statements. Younger children stop at noticing a dissonance between literal and intended meaning, whereas six-year-olds refer also to the inner states of the story’s main character or they introduce interesting metalinguistic explanations

When Sugar-Coated Words Taste Dry: The Relationship between Gender, Anxiety, and Response to Irony

This article approaches the question of mocking compliments and ironic praise from an interactional gender perspective. A statement such as “You're a real genius!” could easily be interpreted as a literal compliment, as playful humor or as an offensive insult. We investigate this thin line in the use of irony among adult men and women. The research introduces an interactional approach to irony, through the lens of gender stereotype bias. The main question concerns the impact of individual differences and gender effect on the perception and production of ironic comments. Irony Processing Task (IPT), developed by Milanowicz (2016), was applied in order to study the production and perception of ironic criticism and ironic praise in adult males and females. It is a rare case of a study measuring the ability to create irony because, unlike most of known irony research, it is not a multiple choice test where participants are given the response options. The IPT was also used to assess the asymmetry of affect (humor vs. malice) and impact of gender effect in the perception of ironic comments. Results are analyzed in relation to the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) scores. The findings reveal the interactional relationship between gender and response to irony. Male responses were consistently more ironic than female's, across all experimental conditions, and female responses varied more. Both, men and women used more irony in response to male ironic criticism but female ironic praise. Anxiety proved to be a moderate predictor of irony comprehension and willingness to use irony. Data, collected in control and two gender stereotype activation conditions, also corroborates the assumption that the detection of compliments and the detection of criticism can be moderated by the attitude activation effect. The results are interpreted within the framework of linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) and natural selection strategies

Deaf Children Building Narrative Texts. Effect of Adult-Shared vs. Non-Shared Perception of a Picture Story

This paper discusses the communicative competence of deaf children. It illustrates the process in which such children build narrative texts in interaction with a deaf teacher, and presents the diversity of this process due to the shared vs. non-shared perception of a picture - the source of the topic. Detailed analyses focus on the formal and semantic aspect of the stories, including the length of the text in sign language, the content selected, information categories, and types of answers to the teacher’s questions. This text is our contribution in memory of Professor Grace Wales Shugar, whose idea of dual agentivity of child-adult interaction inspired the research presented here

The Dialogical Self’s Round Table: Who Sits At It and Where?

We propose a new method to measure distances between different I-positions in internal dialogue. Subjects facing and then making a major life decision via internal dialogue can indicate the places of different voices in the dialogical self’s structure. The subjects’ task is to assign a place to themselves (narrator I) and their imaginary interlocutors at a round table. The Dialogical Self's Round Table (DSRT) task, a modified form of the Semantic Distance Task (SDT; Bartczak & Bokus, 2013, 2017), was designed so that the distances between the different I-positions could be coded numerically. Presenting the method of the DSRT, we will answer the question of which voices are activated the most often in internal dialogues, and which voices can be heard the most often from different locations at the round table. We will also analyze where the subjects place the voices they consider to be the most important