Reference and Informativeness as cognitive processes in verbal communication

Overspecification in reference is the provision of more information than is minimally required for a hearer to identify an intended referent, e.g. ‘the stripy bowl’ in the context of a single bowl. Since this kind of referring expression is not predicted by traditional accounts of reference, this chapter reviews research documenting the frequency of such expressions in various contexts. Drawing together recent empirical findings, it proposes reasons for overspecified reference from both the speaker’s and the addressee’s perspective. The pragmatic, cognitive and social significance of overspecification is discussed, and applications of research in this area are considered. We close by suggesting promising future directions for this strand of research

The Role of Perspective-Taking in Children’s Quantity Implicatures

Young children excel at pragmatic inferences known as ad hoc quantity implicatures: they can infer, for example, that a speaker who said “the card with apples” meant the card with nothing but apples. However, it is not known whether children take into account the speaker’s perspective in deriving such inferences, as adults are able to do, and as the received theories of pragmatics claim. In two experiments, we tested children (5-7 years, N = 33 and N = 25) and adults using a picture-matching director task, in which participants played a game giving cards to the speaker, with some cards being in common ground and some in privileged ground. We found that adults can both derive implicatures when all information is in common ground and not derive them when relevant information is in privileged ground. Children also derive ad hoc implicatures when relevant information is in common ground but, crucially, fail to not derive them when it is in privileged ground. Children’s difficulty to integrate perspective-taking with pragmatic inferencing challenges the received theories about the necessity of perspective-taking in pragmatics

Why some children accept under-informative utterances

Binary judgement on under-informative utterances (e.g. Some horses jumped over the fence, when all horses did) is the most widely used methodology to test children’s ability to generate implicatures. Accepting under-informative utterances is considered a failure to generate implicatures. We present off-line and reaction time evidence for the Pragmatic Tolerance Hypothesis, according to which some children who accept under-informative utterances are in fact competent with implicature but do not consider pragmatic violations grave enough to reject the critical utterance. Seventy-five Dutch-speaking four to nine-year-olds completed a binary (Experiment A) and a ternary judgement task (Experiment B). Half of the children who accepted an utterance in Experiment A penalised it in Experiment B. Reaction times revealed that these children experienced a slow-down in the critical utterances in Experiment A, suggesting that they detected the pragmatic violation even though they did not reject it. We propose that binary judgement tasks systematically underestimate children’s competence with pragmatics

Practitioner Review: Multilingualism and neurodevelopmental disorders – an overview of recent research and discussion of clinical implications

Language and communication skills are essential aspects of child development, which are often disrupted in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. Cutting edge research in psycholinguistics suggests that multilingualism has potential to influence social, linguistic and cognitive development. Thus, multilingualism has implications for clinical assessment, diagnostic formulation, intervention and support offered to families. We present a systematic review and synthesis of the effects of multilingualism for children with neurodevelopmental disorders and discuss clinical implications. Methods We conducted systematic searches for studies on multilingualism in neurodevelopmental disorders. Keywords for neurodevelopmental disorders were based on Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition categories as follows; Intellectual Disabilities, Communication Disorders, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Attention‐Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Specific Learning Disorder, Motor Disorders, Other Neurodevelopmental Disorders. We included only studies based on empirical research and published in peer‐reviewed journals. Results Fifty studies met inclusion criteria. Thirty‐nine studies explored multilingualism in Communication Disorders, 10 in ASD and two in Intellectual Disability. No studies on multilingualism in Specific Learning Disorder or Motor Disorders were identified. Studies which found a disadvantage for multilingual children with neurodevelopmental disorders were rare, and there appears little reason to assume that multilingualism has negative effects on various aspects of functioning across a range of conditions. In fact, when considering only those studies which have compared a multilingual group with developmental disorders to a monolingual group with similar disorders, the findings consistently show no adverse effects on language development or other aspects of functioning. In the case of ASD, a positive effect on communication and social functioning has been observed. Conclusions There is little evidence to support the widely held view that multilingual exposure is detrimental to the linguistic or social development of individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders. However, we also note that the available pool of studies is small and the number of methodologically high quality studies is relatively low. We discuss implications of multilingualism for clinical management of neurodevelopmental disorders, and discuss possible directions for future research.UK Arts & Humanities Research Council. Grant Number: AH/N004671/

Listener-adapted speech:Bilinguals adapt in a more sensitive way

© John Benjamins Publishing Company. While a significant amount of research has focussed on whether bilingualism bestows advantages in cognitive skills, perspective-taking and Theory of Mind, less is known about the effect of bilingualism in communicative tasks where these and related skills may be called for. This study examines bilingual and monolingual adults' communicative skills through their production of two types of listener-adapted speech (LAS): child-directed speech and foreigner-directed speech. 20 monolinguals and 20 bilingual adults were asked to explain a cooking recipe to a child, a non-native adult and a control native adult. Participants adapted their speech for the child and the foreigner compared to the native adult. Furthermore, bilinguals adapted some features of their speech to a greater extent and in a fine-tuned way (wider pitch range addressing the child and vowel hyperarticulation addressing the foreigner). The prevalence of these features in bilingual speech was not correlated with personality or cognitive measures. We discuss possible sources of this difference in speech adaptation and implications for theories of bilingual cognition.This research was partially supported by a grant from the Wiener-Anspach Foundation. In addition, we would like to thank the Isaac Newton Trust and the FWA for support for the project 'The Impact of Bilingualism and Bi-Dialectalism on Linguistic and Cognitive Development" and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) for support through project Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies (MEITS), AH/N004671/

Bilingualism in the family and child well-being: A scoping review

© The Author(s) 2020. Aims and objectives: The aim of this scoping review is to investigate the association between bilingualism in the family and child subjective well-being, by reviewing the literature to identify key themes to date and remaining questions for future research. Methodology: Scopus, Web of Knowledge, ERIC, Psych Articles and PsychInfo were searched systematically between September and October 2018, and after title, abstract and full-text screening, 17 of the initial 1433 articles were included in this review. Data and analysis: Each study was coded for the discipline from which it emerged, the language combination studied, the measures of well-being and language proficiency it used, the geographical location of the study and the number of participants. Data on the link between bilingualism and well-being was extracted from each study. Findings and conclusion: Two main themes were identified: ‘The effect of language proficiency on family relationships’ and ‘The acculturation of parents and children as mediated by language’. Across studies, there was significant heterogeneity in definition of concepts and a diverse range of measures employed. In addition, the studies identified suggest a positive link between minority language maintenance and child well-being, and a positive influence of bilingualism, rather than knowledge of only the home or the majority language. However, the directionality of these relationships will need to be investigated in future research. Originality: This is the first scoping review conducted systematically to explore the link between bilingualism in the family and child well-being internationally. It builds on previous work such as a narrative review which examined this association in the European context.The idea for this review emerged from a series of stakeholder workshops which were supported by an ESRC Impact Acceleration Account grant entitled “Multilingualism for wellbeing: defining routes to impact among community language learners” (GNAG/064) and the production of this review was supported by a grant from the Cambridge University Language Sciences Incubator Fund entitled “Multilingualism and subjective wellbeing in the family: a systematic review” (U.GN.GNDB.AHAO.ERKZ)

A new look at the ‘Generic Overgeneralisation’ effect

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy on 24/02/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2017.1285993peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=sinq20peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=sinq20peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=sinq20peerreview_statement: The publishing and review policy for this title is described in its Aims & Scope. aims_and_scope_url: http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=sinq20While generic generalisations have been studied by linguists and philosophers for decades, they have only recently become the focus of concentrated interest by cognitive and developmental psychologists, who propose the generics-as-default view. In this paper we focus on the ‘Generic Overgeneralisation’ (GOG) effect proposed by Leslie and colleagues and the native speaker judgments that have been used to support it, and by extension, the generics-as-default view. We take a step back to look at the history of the GOG effect in order to contextualise it. We review existing experimental evidence and discuss four non-mutually exclusive explanations for the GOG effect: ignorance, subkind interpretation, atypical behaviour of all and quantifier domain restriction. We conclude that a closer look at the semantics and pragmatics of generics and universal quantifiers may provide a more nuanced explanation for the pattern of judgment data than that proposed by the generics-as-default view

Perspective-taking in deriving implicatures: The listener's perspective is important too

Theories of meaning propose that listeners understand a speaker's implicit meaning thanks to mutually assumed norms of conversation that take into account what the speaker has said, as well as contextual factors, including what the speaker knows. Emerging psycholinguistic research shows that listeners derive a particular kind of implicit meaning, quantity implicatures, when their speaker is knowledgeable about the situation but tend to not derive it otherwise. In this article we focus on if and how listeners use the knowledge that is available only to themselves, i.e., the listener's perspective, while deriving implicatures. To do so, we explore the derivation of ad hoc quantity implicature in situations where the speaker does or does not have full knowledge, while, in the latter case, the listener has two types of privileged knowledge. Two versions of a study with neurotypical English-speaking adults show that listeners are influenced by their own perspective while deriving implicatures, depending on the type of knowledge available to them. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of pragmatic interpretative strategies

Language skills and identity in bilingual education: a case study of a bilingual primary school in England

A common concern for bilingual education is that while it supports additional language learning, it detracts from students’ progress with the society’s dominant language. Several studies in this flourishing area of research have focused on bilingual educational settings using the dominant societal language and a language of that is the native one of the students. Findings are hard to generalise to other educational settings, due to the inherent heterogeneity of bilingual education, including not only the choice of languages used but also the amount and type of exposure to each of them. Here we report on the first stage of a longitudinal study of students in a bilingual primary school in England which uses English, the dominant societal language, and French, a foreign language which is not the home language of any sizeable group of students in the school. In the quantitative part of this research we report that primary school students were achieving progress with foundational language skills in English within the expected range, and that this was the case both for monolingual students as well as children who had an additional home language. In the qualitative part we report on the role which bilingual education can play in the construction of students’ broader multilingual identities. The emerging picture is one where students in this type of bilingual setting are not negatively impacted in their progress with the dominant societal language, and in fact, experience positive changes thanks to the formation of a multilingual identity