Epistemic Vigilance, Cautious Optimism and Sophisticated Understanding

Humans have developed a critical alertness to the believability and reliability of communication: epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al. 2010). It is responsible for trusting interlocutors and believing interpretations. But what is exactly its role in communication? This paper suggests that epistemic vigilance may trigger shifts from a default processing strategy driven by expectations of optimal relevance to more complex processing strategies. These would be enacted when hearers notice speakers’ linguistic mistakes, hearers realise that they have made interpretive mistakes or when hearers discover that speakers seek to mislead them to erroneous or unintended interpretations

Interlocutors-Related and Hearer-Specific Causes of Misunderstanding: Processing Strategy, Confirmation Bias and Weak Vigilance

Noises, similarities between words, slips of the tongue, ambiguities, wrong or false beliefs, lexical deficits, inappropriate inferences, cognitive overload, non-shared knowledge, topic organisation or focusing problems, among others, may cause misunderstanding. While some of these are structural factors, others pertain to the speaker or to both the speaker and the hearer. In addition to stable factors connected with the interlocutors′ communicative abilities, cultural knowledge or patterns of thinking, other less stable factors, such as their personal relationships, psychological states or actions motivated by physiological functions, may also result in communicative problems. This paper considers a series of further factors that may eventually lead to misunderstanding, and which solely pertain to the hearer: processing strategy, confirmation bias and weak vigilance

Lidando com piadas na aula de ESL: uma proposta pedagógica centrada na compreensão

This paper makes a pedagogical proposal to delve into jokes in the ESL classroom and sensitise learners to their complexity. It consists of five instructional phases and is based, on the one hand, on another proposal to teach the pragmatics of speech acts in an L2. On the other hand, this proposal relies on a relevance-theoretic classification of jokes made on the basis of the various linguistic, cultural and cognitive factors that humorists exploit in their production. Since it only centres on how different types of jokes can be distinguished and what their correct comprehension involves, it has a cognitive orientation and does not address issues connected with joke production. The proposal is devised for ESL students with an advanced level of English and ultimately seeks to develop their metalinguistic, meta-cultural and metacognitive abilities as a way of enabling them to grasp the humorousness of funny texts, appraise them and react to them in an appropriate wayEste artigo traz uma proposta pedagógica para aprofundar as piadas na sala de aula de ESL (Inglês como língua estrangeira, na tradução para a língua portuguesa) e sensibilizar os alunos a respeito de sua complexidade. Ela consiste em cinco fases instrucionais que, por um lado, baseia-se em outra proposta de ensino da pragmática dos atos de fala em uma L2 e, por outro lado, baseia-se em uma classificação teórica da relevância das piadas feitas com base nos vários fatores linguísticos, culturais e cognitivos que os humoristas exploram em sua produção. Como a proposta se concentra apenas em como os diferentes tipos de piadas podem ser distinguidos e em qual a correta compreensão envolvida, ela tem uma orientação cognitiva e não aborda questões relacionadas à produção da piada. A proposta é elaborada para estudantes de ESL com um nível avançado de inglês e, por conseguinte, busca desenvolver suas habilidades metalinguísticas, meta-culturais e metacognitivas como uma maneira de permitir-lhes compreender o humor de textos engraçados, avaliá-los e reagir a eles apropriadamenteMinisterio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad. Agencia Estatal de Investigación. FFI2016-76047-

Empirical analysis of the influence of voters and politicians in the public choice of Portuguese municipalities universidade portucalense

When estimating a specification combining different influences on local public choice, three public issues of different ideological attributes were compared for two periods of Portuguese local government intervention: the beginning and the ending of one electoral cycle. The most exciting results of the paper are the significance of ideology at local level and the decline of its importance in the ending of the electoral cycle. There is also some evidence on the political influence of interest groups, especially in low visible issues. On the general issue, majority is also influent and fiscal illusion is found. Some preliminary panel data results including two electoral cycles are analyzed. JEL CLASSIFICATION: H42; H73; R51 KEYWORDS: Median Voter; Interest Groups; Ideology; Local Government, Opportunistic Political Cycle

Percepción de la salud de los niños expresada en el lenguaje creativo de los dibujos

Objective. Children’s health perception through creative drawing language the identification of external factors perceived as negative or positive to health by children. Methodology. A descriptive study that describes the analysis of the expressive language of drawings and written comments. The sample consisted of 130 children in 3rd and 4th classes from four randomly selected schools, in the region of Central Portugal Continental (Coimbra district). The study was conducted during the first semester of 2011. The data collection was performed by means of Rodrigues’ drawing/writing sheet. This sheet is divided in 4 areas (2 of them to draw what children consider good for health and the other 2 to write the content or message of the drawings). The themes expressed are classified based on the priority areas for the promotion of healthy lifestyles. Results. children value healthy food, physical activity, mental health, prevention of inappropriate substance consumption and health and environment. The drawings and comments show links between diet and physical exercise, and between mental health and interpersonal relationships. Conclusion. Drawings and comments facilitate health professionals understanding of children’s perception of health positive and negative factors. The results of the study allow planning intervention strategies in school health from infant perception