Gesturing during disfluent speech: A pragmatic account.

People are more likely to gesture when their speech is disfluent. Why? According to an influential proposal, speakers gesture when they are disfluent because gesturing helps them to produce speech. Here, we test an alternative proposal: People may gesture when their speech is disfluent because gestures serve as a pragmatic signal, telling the listener that the speaker is having problems with speaking. To distinguish between these proposals, we tested the relationship between gestures and speech disfluencies when listeners could see speakers' gestures and when they were prevented from seeing their gestures. If gesturing helps speakers to produce words, then the relationship between gesture and disfluency should persist regardless of whether gestures can be seen. Alternatively, if gestures during disfluent speech are pragmatically motivated, then the tendency to gesture more when speech is disfluent should disappear when the speaker's gestures are invisible to the listener. Results showed that speakers were more likely to gesture when their speech was disfluent, but only when the listener could see their gestures and not when the listener was prevented from seeing them, supporting a pragmatic account of the relationship between gestures and disfluencies. People tend to gesture more when speaking is difficult, not because gesturing facilitates speech production, but rather because gestures comment on the speaker's difficulty presenting an utterance to the listener.

Meaning as mentalization.

The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in developmental science as well. The relation between linguistic form and content has been loosened up in recent pragmatic approaches to communication, showing that code-based models of language comprehension must be augmented by context-sensitive, pragmatic-inferential mechanisms to recover the speaker's intended meaning. Language acquisition has traditionally been thought to involve building a mental lexicon and extracting syntactic rules from noisy linguistic input, while communicative-pragmatic inferences have also been argued to be indispensable. Recent research findings exploring the electrophysiological indicator of semantic processing, the N400, have raised serious questions about the traditional separation between semantic decoding and pragmatic inferential processes. The N400 appears to be sensitive to mentalization-the ability to attribute beliefs to social partners-already from its developmental onset. This finding raises the possibility that mentalization may not simply contribute to pragmatic inferences that enrich linguistic decoding processes but that the semantic system may be functioning in a fundamentally mentalistic manner. The present review first summarizes the key contributions of pragmatic models of communication to language comprehension. Then, it provides an overview of how communicative intentions are interpreted in developmental theories of communication, with a special emphasis on mentalization. Next, it discusses the sensitivity of infants to the information-transmitting potential of language, their ability to pick up its code-like features, and their capacity to track language comprehension of social partners using mentalization. In conclusion, I argue that the recovery of meaning during linguistic communication is not adequately modeled as a process of code-based semantic retrieval complemented by pragmatic inferences. Instead, the semantic system may establish meaning, as intended, during language comprehension and acquisition through mentalistic attribution of content to communicative partners.

That kid is a grasshopper! Metaphor development from 3 to 9 years of age.

Two major trends on children's skills to comprehend metaphors have governed the literature on the subject: the literal stage hypothesis vs. the early birds hypothesis (Falkum, 2022). We aim to contribute to this debate by testing children's capability to comprehend novel metaphors ('X is a Y') in Spanish with a child-friendly, picture selection task, while also tracking their gaze. Further, given recent findings on the development of metonymy comprehension suggesting a U-shaped developmental curve for this phenomenon (Köder & Falkum, 2020), we aimed to determine the shape of the developmental trajectory of novel metaphor comprehension, and to explore how both types of data (picture selection and gaze behavior) relate to each other. Our results suggest a linear developmental trajectory with 6-year-olds significantly succeeding in picture selection and consistently looking at the metaphorical target even after question onset.

Minimizing Entropy and Complexity in Creative Production from Emergent Pragmatics to Action Semantics.

New insights into intractable industrial challenges can be revealed by framing them in terms of natural science. One intractable industrial challenge is that creative production can be much more financially expensive and time consuming than standardized production. Creative products include a wide range of goods that have one or more original characteristics. The scaling up of creative production is hindered by high financial production costs and long production durations. In this paper, creative production is framed in terms of interactions between entropy and complexity during progressions from emergent pragmatics to action semantics. An analysis of interactions between entropy and complexity is provided that relates established practice in creative production to organizational survival in changing environments. The analysis in this paper is related to assembly theory, which is a recent theoretical development in natural science that addresses how open-ended generation of complex physical objects can emerge from selection in biology. Parallels between assembly practice in industrial production and assembly theory in natural science are explained through constructs that are common to both, such as assembly index. Overall, analyses reported in the paper reveal that interactions between entropy and complexity underlie intractable challenges in creative production, from the production of individual products to the survival of companies.

EXPRESS: Experimental evidence for a semantic typology of emoji: Inferences of co-, pro-, and post-text emoji.

Emoji symbols are widely used in online communication, particularly in instant messaging and on social media platforms. Existing research draws comparisons between the functions of emoji and those of gestures, with recent work extending a proposed typology of gestures to emoji, arguing that different emoji types can be distinguished by their placement within the modified text and by their semantic contribution (the linguistic inferences that they give rise to). In this paper, we present four experiments designed to test the predictions of this extended typology, the results of which suggest that emoji symbols indeed trigger the hypothesized linguistic inferences. The findings provide support for a semantic typology of emoji and contribute further evidence of the parallels between gesture and emoji.

Epistemic language in news headlines shapes readers' perceptions of objectivity.

How we reason about objectivity-whether an assertion has a ground truth-has implications for belief formation on wide-ranging topics. For example, if someone perceives climate change to be a matter of subjective opinion similar to the best movie genre, they may consider empirical claims about climate change as mere opinion and irrelevant to their beliefs. Here, we investigate whether the language employed by journalists might influence the perceived objectivity of news claims. Specifically, we ask whether factive verb framing (e.g., "Scientists know climate change is happening") increases perceived objectivity compared to nonfactive framing (e.g., "Scientists believe [...]"). Across eight studies (N = 2,785), participants read news headlines about unique, noncontroversial topics (studies 1a-b, 2a-b) or a familiar, controversial topic (climate change; studies 3a-b, 4a-b) and rated the truth and objectivity of the headlines' claims. Across all eight studies, when claims were presented as beliefs (e.g., "Tortoise breeders believe tortoises are becoming more popular pets"), people consistently judged those claims as more subjective than claims presented as knowledge (e.g., "Tortoise breeders know…"), as well as claims presented as unattributed generics (e.g., "Tortoises are becoming more popular pets"). Surprisingly, verb framing had relatively little, inconsistent influence over participants' judgments of the truth of claims. These results demonstrate how, apart from shaping whether we believe a claim is true or false, epistemic language in media can influence whether we believe a claim has an objective answer at all.

Weighing the role of social cognition and executive functioning in pragmatics in the schizophrenia spectrum: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Pragmatic impairment is diffused in schizophrenia spectrum disorders, but the literature still debates its neurocognitive underpinnings. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to investigate the neurocognitive correlates of pragmatic disorders in schizophrenia and determine the weight of social cognition and executive functioning on such disorders. Of the 2,668 records retrieved from the literature, 16 papers were included in the systematic review, mostly focused on non-literal meanings and discourse production in schizophrenia. Ten studies were included in the meta-analysis: pragmatics was moderately associated with both social cognition and executive functions (especially inhibition), but the link with social cognition was stronger. The mediation analysis showed that social cognition mediated the relationship between executive functions and pragmatics. Based on this, we proposed a hierarchical neurocognitive model where pragmatics stems from social cognition, while executive functions are the fertile ground supporting the other two domains, and we discuss its theoretical and clinical implications.

Is metaphor a natural kind?

In Metaphor Studies, metaphor is considered as a "form of understanding one thing in terms of something else." It is assumed that, despite their differences, metaphors share many properties and that a theory of metaphor should capture these essential properties. In short, it is assumed that metaphor is a natural kind. We call this view the Natural Kind Assumption. In this paper, we will challenge it and show that metaphor is not a natural kind. Finally, we will discuss the main philosophical consequences of this view.

On the Role of Loopholes in Polite Communication: Linking Subjectivity and Pragmatic Inference.

Existing proposals on the attenuating uses of indirect, negated expressions (e.g., not happy to mean sad) agree that speakers exploit indirectness for pragmatic purposes but differ on the underlying sources they attribute to these uses. Here, we synthesize existing proposals via adjective subjectivity, which operationalizes the notion of loopholes for plausible deniability. We present experimental evidence that the degree of subjectivity of an adjective predicts the degree to which participants strengthen the negated adjective's meaning, but only if the adjective under consideration has an evaluatively-positive meaning. This finding indicates that speakers may intentionally use negation to leave themselves the option to retract the implicated face-threatening meaning if openly challenged.

Adding to the Conversation: Language Delays and Parent-Child Interactions in the Younger Siblings of Children With Autism.

In their first three years, children begin to maintain topics and add new information in conversation. In turn, caregivers create opportunities for language learning. Compared to children with no family history of autism (typical likelihood, TL), the younger siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are at elevated likelihood (EL) for both ASD and language delays. This study asked: (1) Do profiles of spoken language and conversational skills differ across groups? (2) Does spoken language relate to conversational skills? and (3) How does parent speech relate to child spoken language and conversational skills? Child spoken language, conversational skills, and parent speech were examined during toy play at home with three-year-old TL (n = 16) and EL children with ASD (EL-ASD, n = 10), non-ASD language delay (EL-LD, n = 21), and no delays or diagnoses (EL-ND, n = 37). EL-ASD children produced fewer intelligible utterances, and EL-LD and EL-ASD children produced shorter utterances than TL and EL-ND children. When utterances were intelligible, all groups were highly contingent to the topic. EL-ASD children were less likely than all other groups to add new information, and adding new information was positively associated with utterance length. Parents of EL-ASD children had fewer opportunities to respond contingently. However, all parents were highly topic-contingent when child speech was intelligible, and parent speech complexity varied with child language and conversational skills. Findings highlight strengths in conversational skills for EL-ASD children during toy play with parents and show that children and caregivers together shape opportunities for developing language and conversation.

A comparison of human and GPT-4 use of probabilistic phrases in a coordination game.

English speakers use probabilistic phrases such as likely to communicate information about the probability or likelihood of events. Communication is successful to the extent that the listener grasps what the speaker means to convey and, if communication is successful, individuals can potentially coordinate their actions based on shared knowledge about uncertainty. We first assessed human ability to estimate the probability and the ambiguity (imprecision) of twenty-three probabilistic phrases in a coordination game in two different contexts, investment advice and medical advice. We then had GPT-4 (OpenAI), a Large Language Model, complete the same tasks as the human participants. We found that GPT-4's estimates of probability both in the Investment and Medical Contexts were as close or closer to that of the human participants as the human participants' estimates were to one another. However, further analyses of residuals disclosed small but significant differences between human and GPT-4 performance. Human probability estimates were compressed relative to those of GPT-4. Estimates of probability for both the human participants and GPT-4 were little affected by context. We propose that evaluation methods based on coordination games provide a systematic way to assess what GPT-4 and similar programs can and cannot do.

Pragmatic skills in people with Williams syndrome: the perception of families.

BACKGROUND: One of the most challenging linguistic areas in people with Williams Syndrome throughout their evolutionary stage is the development of pragmatic skills. The research conducted so far highlights specific problems concerning adaptation to the linguistic context and interlocutors, language comprehension, as well as other aspects interfering with verbal communication. However, until now, most scientific evidence has been based on personal assessments of this group. In a complementary manner, the goal of this study was to discover the level of pragmatic skills of people with Williams Syndrome from the point of view of the families. The sample consisted of 34 families belonging to the Williams Syndrome Association of Spain. The assessment instrument was the pragmatic awareness questionnaire, which includes 26 items related to different aspects that are part of the pragmatic area on a Likert-type scale. RESULTS: The results indicate that, families consider there to be a regular to low level in all the areas assessed. The strong points seem to lie in the paralinguistic aspects, while the weakest factors are those related to the understanding of figurative language. CONCLUSIONS: Therefore, it is necessary to continue insisting on the importance of language intervention in this group throughout its development to improve its level of linguistic competence.

Children's communication repair strategies: Online versus face-to-face interaction.

INTRODUCTION: One's ability to repair communication breakdown is an important pragmatic language skill. The present study examined children's communication repair strategies between online and face-to-face interactions using a reading comprehension task designed to probe for persistent clarification requests. METHODS: 4-6-year-old typically developing children (Age: M = 5.5years) completed a communication repair task. Online group (n = 17) completed the task online, face-to-face group(n = 22) met researchers in person. Children's responses were then categorized into verbal strategies, supplementary strategies, and nonresponses. RESULTS: Our results showed that children can effectively employ repair strategies when a communication breakdown occurs, regardless of the communication setting in response to a series of clarification requests. However, types and patterns of communication repair strategies varied between online and face-to-face interactions. Children in online interaction showed higher use of repetition and suprasegmental strategies than did their face-to-face peers. In contrast, children in face-to-face interaction demonstrated more frequent use of revision and addition. Also, we examined the relationship between repair strategy and children's language skills. The results showed that children with better language skills used more addition, which is a more complex strategy than suprasegmental and nonresponse, and tried to use repair strategies effectively in an attempt to repair their statements as clarification requests proceeded. CONCLUSION: It is important to understand different trends of pragmatic skills of children across online and face-to-face interaction. Guidance on the effective strategy to repair communication breakdowns depending on the different contexts needs to be considered for the successful use of online learning and telepractice.

Validation of PleaseApp: a digital tool for the assessment of receptive pragmatic abilities in children with neurodevelopmental disorders.

Background: Pragmatic skills allow children to use language for social purposes, that is, to communicate and interact with people. Most children with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) face pragmatic difficulties during development. Nevertheless, pragmatic skills are often only partially assessed because the existing instruments usually focus on specific aspects of pragmatics and are not always adapted to children with communication difficulties. In this sense, digital tools (e.g., apps) are an optimal method to compensate for some difficulties. Moreover, there is a lack of pragmatic tools measuring the receptive domain. Therefore, the present study aims to validate PleaseApp as a digital instrument that measures eight pragmatic skills by presenting the design of the assessment tool and its psychometric properties. Methods: PleaseApp was designed based on previous empirical studies of developmental pragmatics in children with and without NDD. PleaseApp assesses eight receptive pragmatic skills: figurative language, narrative, reference, indirect speech acts, visual and verbal humor, gesture-speech integration, politeness, and complex intentionality. The study involved 150 typically developing children between 5 and 12 years of age. Results: A confirmatory factor analysis proposes an eight-factor model with no underlying factor structure. The eight tests that compose PleaseApp have obtained a model with a good fit and with adequate reliability and validity indices. Discussion: PleaseApp is an objective, valid, and reliable tool for assessing pragmatic skills in children with NDD. In this sense, it helps to assess whether a child has acquired pragmatic skills correctly according to his/her age and clarify the specific problems a child has in eight different components to plan personal and personalized interventions.

Pragmemes revisited. A theoretical framework.

In this paper, we take up an old issue that of pragmemes, broached by Mey and further explored by Capone. It is not easy to define pragmemes and distinguish them sufficiently from speech acts (units of language use broached by Austin and Searle) or from Wittgensteinian language games or from macro speech acts (see van Dijk on macrostructures) or from Goffman's scripts. The best idea we could develop about pragmemes is that they instantiate the triple articulation of language, proposed by Jock Wong; being essentially composed of phonological-syntactic units, that have a certain content relative to a social situation and to a certain culture, pragmemes express a certain function (or illocutionary force), like, e.g., modifying society or some aspect of it. They are part of a chapter that can be called either "societal pragmatics" or "emancipatory pragmatics," to use the words by Mey. In fact, knowledge of how language is used to diminish the rights of people and to propagate the "status quo" may be instrumental to give rights and power to ordinary human beings who are oppressed by political and economical structures.

The analysis of gestural and verbal pragmatic markers produced by Mild Cognitive Impaired participants during longitudinal and autobiographical interviews.

CONTEXT: This corpus-based study presents a multimodal analysis of verbal pragmatic markers and non-verbal pragmatic markers in elderly people with Mild Cognitive Impairment aged over 75 years. METHODS: The corpus collection and analysis methodology has been described in the Belgian CorpAGEst transversal study and the French VintAGE longitudinal and transversal oriented pilot studies. The protocols are available online in both English and French. RESULTS & CONCLUSION: Our general findings indicate that with ageing, verbal pragmatic markers acquire an interactive function that allows people with MCI to maintain intersubjective relationships with their interlocutor. Furthermore, at the non-verbal level, gestural manifestations are increasingly used over time with a preference for non-verbal pragmatic markers with a referential function and an adaptive function. We aim to show the benefits of linguistic and interactional scientific investigation methods through cognitive impaired ageing for clinicians and family caregivers.

A tutorial on discourse analysis in healthy and pathological ageing.

BACKGROUND: Age is a key factor when dealing with language and speech disorders, as it entails a progressive loss of neuroplasticity even in healthy individuals. Apart from this, ageing also affects our word-retrieval abilities, and thus, our discursive skills, particularly in people suffering from neurodegenerative diseases. Therefore, descriptions and/or measures of communicative performance always need to be interpreted through the lens of variation across the lifespan. AIM: This paper's main objective is to create a general tutorial for researchers willing to start delving into discourse analysis, both in healthy and pathological ageing. METHODS: An eight-step tutorial on discourse analysis in the elderly is presented. Each of these steps starts with general recommendations and progresses to more specific topics that may be relevant when conducting this type of research. All of the steps have been extrapolated from an extensive literature review on discourse analysis. MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS: This work presents an easy-to-follow, step-by-step tutorial on discourse analysis in the elderly. It is aimed at clinical researchers who are taking their first steps in discourse analysis.It may also be useful for those who are already familiar with the methodology but may be interested in reading a general overview on the topic. Moreover, it offers new insights into the following topics: types of research questions, advantages and disadvantages of the different research methodologies and ethical considerations for data production in clinical linguistics. CONCLUSIONS: Discourse analysis in the elderly is a highly complex issue that may require researching from different approaches and disciplines. This implies following a well-planned and thorough process, which we have detailed through the following eight steps: (i) reviewing literature; (ii) formulating the research question; (iii) designing the study; (iv) producing data; (v) selecting technological tools for data treatment; (vi) transcribing the corpus; (vii) annotating the corpus and (viii) analysing and interpreting the results. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on the subject Approaches in discourse analysis in elderly adults, and particularly, in people suffering from dementia have already been analysed by previous researchers and categorised into three main trends: the quantitative-experimental approach, the qualitative-naturalistic approach and an in-between path, the quantitative-naturalistic approach. Also, several handbooks on general discourse analysis have presented comprehensive revisions on potential resources and methodologies that can be applied to researching discourse in elderly populations. What this paper adds to existing knowledge This paper takes these three main approaches and analyses how the most recent research on language in ageing and dementia fits into them. Furthermore, it reviews the advantages and disadvantages each of them may bring for beginners in the field of discourse analysis. Moreover, it adds some studies that may fit into a fourth approach: the qualitative-experimental. This article also presents information about several of the main steps when analysing data from the pragmatic perspective: the formulation of the research question, data production and the transcription/annotation process. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? This work has been devised for linguists who may want to read a systematization of the steps for analysing discourse in elderly populations. It may also be of interest to specialists from different fields such as speech therapy, psychology, gerontology or neurology who desire to start applying methods from discourse analysis in their work and aim to have a comprehensive scope of the main research trends within the field of clinical pragmatics.

Figurative language processing in autism spectrum disorders: A review.

Impairments in the broader domain of pragmatics are considered to be a defining feature of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). A challenging aspect of pragmatic competence is the ability to process nonliteral language. Interestingly, previous studies in figurative language comprehension in ASD have demonstrated conflicting results regarding participants' performance. The main scientific debate focuses on the underlying skills which facilitate processing of nonliteral speech in ASD. Namely, Theory of Mind (ToM), language abilities and Executive functions (EFs) are regarded as factors affecting autistic individuals' performance. This review addresses figurative language comprehension in ASD in light of the above three interpretive accounts. We reviewed data from recent studies in this field concluding that autistic children indeed encounter systematic difficulties in the processing of non-literal language. Moreover, only ToM and verbal skills were found to correlate the most with figurative language comprehension in ASD. Notably, we found that differences related to research methodology and tasks' properties may have led to discrepancies between studies' results. Finally, we argue that future studies should encompass in their experimental design figurative comprehension tasks with minimal linguistic demands and also measures of ToM, verbal ability and EFs in order to shed more light in the independent contribution of those skills to the processing of nonliteral language in ASD.

Preschool children generate quantity inferences from both words and pictures.

As children learn to communicate with others, they must develop an understanding of the principles that underlie human communication. Recent evidence suggests that adults expect communicative principles to govern all forms of communication, not just language, but evidence about children's ability to do so is sparse. This study investigated whether preschool children expect both pictures and words to adhere to the communicative principle of quantity using a simple matched paradigm. Children (N = 293) aged of 3 to 5 years (52.5% male and 47.5% female; majority White with college-educated mothers) participated. Results show that children as young as 3.5 years can use the communicative principle of quantity to infer meaning across verbal and pictorial alternatives.

Sleep problems in children with autism spectrum disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: A comparative study and effects on communication skills.

Sleep disturbances are highly prevalent among children with neurodevelopmental disorders, like Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention-Deficit/Hiperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The first objective of this study is to examine the differences in sleep problems between a group of children with ASD without intellectual disabilities, a group with ADHD and a typically developing (TD) group. A second objective is aimed at analyzing the effects of sleep problems and symptom severity on their communication skills. Participants were 122 children between 7 and 12 years old distributed in three groups: 32 TD children, 47 children with ASD and 43 children with ADHD, matched on age and intelligence. Parents completed different questionnaires that measured sleep disturbances and communication skills. Findings show significant differences between the clinical groups and the TD group in most types of sleep disorders. Moreover, the group with ADHD showed significantly more sleep breathing disorders and hyperhidrosis in comparison with ASD and TD, as well as more total sleep problems. In contrast to ASD, the predictive power of sleep problems on communication difficulties was greater in the group with ADHD. The results of the mediation analysis indicate that in both groups, sleep problems partially mediate the relationship between symptoms and communication. This investigation highlights the need of considering sleep disorders when assessing communication skills in ASD and ADHD, given its indirect influence in this domain. Understanding the sleep dysfunctions of both conditions and their repercussions is crucial to develop adjusted interventions.