Refusing to Endorse. A must Explanation for Pejoratives.

In her analysis of pejoratives, Eva Picardi rejects a too sharp separation between descriptive and expressive content. I reconstruct some of her arguments, endorsing Eva’s criticism of Williamson’s analysis of Dummett and developing a suggestion by Manuel Garcia Carpintero on a speech act analysis of pejoratives. Eva’s main concern is accounting for our instinctive refusal to endorse an assertion containing pejoratives because it suggests a picture of reality we do not share. Her stance might be further developed claiming that uses of pejoratives not only suggest, but also promote a wrong picture of reality. Our refusal to endorse implies rejecting not only a wrong picture of reality but also a call for participation to what that picture promotes

Indirect request processing, sentence types and illocutionary forces

According to the literalist view of speech acts, morpho-syntactic sentence types are associated directly at the semantic level with an illocutionary force. By contrast, according to contextualist theories illocutionary force emerges from contexts of use. To date, however, there is little experimental evidence relevant to this debate. We propose two experimental, eye-tracking studies to test two predictions of the literalist view: First, unlike for the highly conventionalised Can you? forms, whenever a non-conventionalised construction such as Is it possible to? is interpreted as a request, its question interpretation should also be activated. Second, the directive interpretation of modal You must declaratives should activate the statement interpretation and, therefore, be costlier than that of imperatives. In Study 1, we show, first, that, in contexts where both the non-directive and directive interpretation of indirect requests are available, the latter are processed as fast as that of the corresponding imperatives, independently of the conventionalisation degree of the indirect request at hand. Second, eye fixation data show that the comprehension of indirect requests does not activate their direct meaning. Study 2 shows that modal You must declaratives are understood as imperatives and do not activate a statement interpretation; this supports the view that obligation modal requests are as direct as imperative requests

An eye-tracking study of selective trust development in children with and without autism spectrum disorder

The purpose of this study was to explore whether children with autism display selectivity in social learning. We investigated the processing of word mappings provided by speakers who differed on previously demonstrated accuracy and on potential degree of reliability in three groups of children (children with autism spectrum disorder, children with developmental language disorder, and typically developing children) aged 4–9 years. In Task 1, one speaker consistently misnamed familiar objects and the second speaker consistently gave correct names. In Task 2, both speakers provided correct information but differed on how they could achieve this accuracy. We analyzed how the speakers’ profiles influenced children's decisions to rely on them in order to learn novel words. We also examined how children attended to the speakers’ testimony by tracking their eye movements and comparing children’ gaze distribution across speakers’ faces and objects of their choice. Results show that children rely on associative trait attribution heuristics to selectively learn from accurate speakers. In Task 1, children in all groups preferred the novel object selected by accurate speakers and directly avoided information provided by previously inaccurate speakers, as revealed by the eye-tracking data. In Task 2, where more sophisticated reasoning about speakers’ reliability was required, only children in the typically developing group performed above chance. Nonverbal intelligence score emerged as a predictor of children's preference for more reliable informational sources. In addition, children with autism exhibited reduced attention to speakers’ faces compared with children in the comparison groups

Resisting attraction: Individual differences in executive control are associated with subject-verb agreement errors in production.

We propose that attraction errors in agreement production (e.g., the key to the cabinets are missing) are related to two components of executive control: working memory and inhibitory control. We tested 138 children aged 10 to 12, an age when children are expected to produce high rates of errors. To increase the potential of individual variation in executive control skills, participants came from monolingual, bilingual, and bidialectal language backgrounds. Attraction errors were elicited with a picture description task in Dutch and executive control was measured with a digit span task, Corsi blocks task, switching task, and attentional networks task. Overall, higher rates of attraction errors were negatively associated with higher verbal working memory and, independently, with higher inhibitory control. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of the role of both working memory and inhibitory control in attraction errors in production. Implications for memory- and grammar-based models are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Recor

Strategic Deception in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often associated with impaired perspective-taking skills. Deception is an important indicator of perspective-taking, and therefore may be thought to pose difficulties to people with ASD (e.g., Baron-Cohen in J Child Psychol Psychiatry 3:1141–1155, 1992). To test this hypothesis, we asked participants with and without ASD to play a computerised deception game. We found that participants with ASD were equally likely—and in complex cases of deception even more likely—to deceive and detect deception, and learned deception at a faster rate. However, participants with ASD initially deceived less frequently, and were slower at detecting deception. These results suggest that people with ASD readily engage in deception but may do so through conscious and effortful reasoning about other people’s perspective

Context, facial expression and prosody in irony processing

While incongruence with the background context is a powerful cue for irony, in spoken conversation ironic utterances often bear non-contextual cues, such as marked tone of voice and/or facial expression. In Experiment 1, we show that ironic prosody and facial expression can be correctly discriminated as such in a categorization task, even though the boundaries between ironic and non-ironic cues are somewhat fuzzy. However, an act-out task (Experiments 2 & 3) reveals that prosody and facial expression are considerably less reliable cues for irony comprehension than contextual incongruence. Reaction time and eye-tracking data indicate that these non-contextual cues entail a trade-off between accuracy and processing speed. These results suggest that interpreters privilege frugal, albeit less reliable pragmatic heuristics over costlier, but more reliable, contextual processing

Beyond locutionary denotations: exploring trust between practitioners and policy

This study reports the findings of a research on the trust relationship between practitioners in the Skills for Life (SfL) area and the policy that informs their practice. The exploration of this relationship was premised on an extended notion of trust relationship which draws from the Speech Act theory of Austin (1962; Searle 1969; Kissine 2008), leading to the claim that the existence of different layers of imports in textual analysis makes it possible for a trust relationship to exist between the human/physical and the non human/non physical. The study found that the majority of practitioners in the SfL field trust policy to deliver its inherent policy only to a limited extent. Amongst others, the study identified the impact of the perlocutionary import of policy text on practitioners as a viable reason for this limited level of trust. Such perlocutionary imports, it also found, have adverse impact on practitioners who are considered to have drawn from previous experience to mediate the import of contemporary policies

Language in autism: domains, profiles and co-occurring conditions

This article reviews the current knowledge state on pragmatic and structural language abilities in autism and their potential relation to extralinguistic abilities and autistic traits. The focus is on questions regarding autism language profles with varying degrees of (selective) impairment and with respect to potential comorbidity of autism and language impairment: Is language impairment in autism the co-occurrence of two distinct conditions (comorbidity), a consequence of autism itself (no comorbidity), or one possible combination from a series of neurodevelopmental properties (dimensional approach)? As for language profles in autism, three main groups are identifed, namely, (i) verbal autistic individuals without structural language impairment, (ii) verbal autistic individuals with structural language impairment, and (iii) minimally verbal autistic individuals. However, this tripartite distinction hides enormous linguistic heterogeneity. Regarding the nature of language impairment in autism, there is currently no model of how language difculties may interact with autism characteristics and with various extralinguistic cognitive abilities. Building such a model requires carefully designed explorations that address specifc aspects of language and extralinguistic cognition. This should lead to a fundamental increase in our understanding of language impairment in autism, thereby paving the way for a substantial contribution to the question of how to best characterize neurodevelopmental disorders

Struggling with alternative descriptions: Impaired referential processing in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Background: Children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) show a tendency to preferentially rely on those referential descriptions that have previously been used by their conversational partner. However, such a tendency may become maladaptive in a situation of interaction with different partners who may introduce alternative lexical descriptions for the same referent. Methods: Six-year-old children with ASD, as well as mental- and verbal-age-matched typically developing (TD) children moved items on a touch-screen following instructions by an experimenter. During the entrainment phase, the experimenter introduced lexical descriptions for all the items. Then, either the original experimenter or a new partner, depending on the condition, used alternative descriptions for some items and kept the same descriptions for others. Accuracy and time to locate items were collected. Results: Relative to TD children, children with ASD had more difficulty in recognizing and interpreting referential descriptions when another description has been previously used. Whether a new description was introduced by a new or the original experimenter had no effect in any group. Conclusion: Referential processing in ASD is compromised by impaired ability to confront alternative conceptual perspectives. A potential executive source for these difficulties is discussed