Pragmatic Comprehension Development through Telecollaboration

Electrophysiology and Pragmatic Language Comprehension

Pragmatic Comprehension in Schizophrenia: Metaphor and Irony

Many schizophrenic patients are reported to have impaired theory-of-mind (ToM) and/or formal thought disorder and as these terms will be referred to throughout the research it is important to briefly clarify their meanings. The ability to make appropriate inferences about other people's thoughts when the objective facts do not allow these thoughts to be directly understood is referred to as the...

Pragmatic development

I review research on the pragmatic, or social, aspects of language development in children, adolescents, and young adults with Down syndrome. Virtually all facets of pragmatic development have been found to be delayed in Down syndrome, but some facets are especially delayed relative to cognitive development. Areas of strength in pragmatics (e.g., narration), however, have also been identified. ...

Pragmatic skills predict online counterfactual comprehension: Evidence from the N400

Counterfactual thought allows people to consider alternative worlds they know to be false. Communicating these thoughts through language poses a social-communicative challenge because listeners typically expect a speaker to produce true utterances, but counterfactuals per definition convey information that is false. Listeners must therefore incorporate overt linguistic cues (subjunctive mood, s...

Speaker knowledge influences the comprehension of pragmatic inferences.

Inferring what speakers mean from what they say requires consideration of what they know. For instance, depending on the speaker's level of expertise, uttering Some squirrels hibernate can imply that not all squirrels hibernate, or it might imply the weaker proposition that the speaker does not know whether all squirrels hibernate. The present study examines the extent to which speaker knowledg...