Does Lexical Coordination Affect Epistemic and Practical Trust? The Role of Conceptual Pacts.

The present study investigated whether humans are more likely to trust people who are coordinated with them. We examined a well-known type of linguistic coordination, lexical entrainment, typically involving the elaboration of "conceptual pacts," or partner-specific agreements on how to conceptualize objects. In two experiments, we manipulated lexical entrainment in a referential communication task and measured the effect of this manipulation on epistemic and practical trust. Our results showed that participants were more likely to trust a coordinated partner than an uncoordinated one, but only when the latter broke previously established conceptual pacts.

Taking stock of an idiom's background assumptions: an alternative relevance theoretic account.

This paper begins by presenting the theoretical background of, and the accompanying psycholinguistic findings on, idiom processing. The paper then widens its lens by comparing the idiom processing literature to that of metaphor and irony. We do so partly to better understand the idiom superiority effect, according to which idiomatic sentences (unlike metaphoric and ironic ones) are generally processed faster than their literal controls; part of our motivation is to reconcile the differences between idiom processing, on the one hand, and metaphor and irony processing on the other. This ultimately leads us to Relevance Theory (RT), which has provided original insights into the processing of figurative language generally, but especially with respect to metaphor and irony. RT has paid less attention to idiomatic expressions (such as break the ice, fan the flames, or spill the beans), where one finds a single RT account that likens idioms to conventional metaphors. Through our overview, we ultimately arrive at an alternative RT account of idioms: We argue that idioms include a procedural meaning that takes into account relevant presuppositional information. For example, an idiomatic string such as break the ice not only asserts initiate social contact, it prompts the recovery of background assumptions such as there exists a social distance that calls for relief. This leads us (a) to apply linguistic-intuition tests of our presuppositional hypothesis, and; (b) to describe the paradigm and results from a pilot experiment. Both provide support for our claims. In doing so, we provide an original explanation for the idiom superiority effect.

Face Management and Negative Strengthening: The Role of Power Relations, Social Distance, and Gender.

Negated gradable adjectives often convey an interpretation that is stronger than their literal meaning, which is referred to as 'negative strengthening.' For example, a sentence like 'John is not kind' may give rise to the inference that John is rather mean. Crucially, negation is more likely to be pragmatically strengthened in the case of positive adjectives ('not kind' to mean rather mean) than negative adjectives ('not mean' to mean rather kind). A classical explanation of this polarity asymmetry is based on politeness, specifically on the potential face threat of bare negative adjectives (Horn, 1989; Brown and Levinson, 1987). This paper presents the results of two experiments investigating the role of face management in negative strengthening. We show that negative strengthening of positive and negative adjectives interacts differently with the social variables of power, social distance, and gender.

Epistemic Trust and the Emergence of Conduct Problems: Aggression in the Service of Communication.

Fonagy and colleagues have recently proposed that deficits in the capacity for epistemic trust (i. e., the expectation that interpersonal communication is relevant to the addressee) are fundamental to psychopathology. In this paper, we consider the implications of this hypothesis for understanding the role of aggression in conduct disorder and conduct problems more generally. Our main proposal is to view conduct problems not only as reflecting dysregulation, but as an adaptation that allows communication with others who are (or are perceived to be) unreliable. Our formulation hinges on two propositions. The first one is to view aggression as a modality of communication adapted to scenarios in which the communicator expects the audience to have low epistemic trust in the communicator. The second idea is to conceptualize the failed "unlearning of aggression" as reflecting a lack of interest in maintaining one's reputation as a communicator, which in turn stems from a lack of epistemic trust in other communicators. In this paper, we discuss these ideas and examine how they may account for the developmental pathways that lead young people to develop conduct problems.

Believing What You're Told: Politeness and Scalar Inferences.

The experimental pragmatics literature has extensively investigated the ways in which distinct contextual factors affect the computation of scalar inferences, whose most studied example is the one that allows "Some X-ed" to mean Not all X-ed. Recent studies from Bonnefon et al. (2009, 2011) investigate the effect of politeness on the interpretation of scalar utterances. They argue that when the scalar utterance is face-threatening ("Some people hated your speech") (i) the scalar inference is less likely to be derived, and (ii) the semantic interpretation of "some" (at least some) is arrived at slowly and effortfully. This paper re-evaluates the role of politeness in the computation of scalar inferences by drawing on the distinction between "comprehension" and "epistemic assessment" of communicated information. In two experiments, we test the hypothesis that, in these face-threatening contexts, scalar inferences are largely derived but are less likely to be accepted as true. In line with our predictions, we find that slowdowns in the face-threatening condition are attributable to longer reaction times at the (latter) epistemic assessment stage, but not at the comprehension stage.