An interesting issue for any mentalist approach to pragmatics is whether the utterance comprehension system is an autonomous processor within the overall cognitive system or consists of processes carried out by an unencapsulated central inferencing system. Two approaches to pragmatics which claim to involve modular subsystems in utterance understanding are discussed (Barton's contextual submodu...

The work reported in this paper investigated the putative functional dependence of pragmatic language skills on general mind-reading capacity by testing theory-of-mind abilities and understanding of non-literal speech in patients with schizophrenia and in healthy controls. Patients showed difficulties with inferring mental states on a false-belief picture-sequencing task and with understanding ...

Many individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) are known to have difficulties in understanding pragmatic aspects of language. In the present study, a group of eleven non-demented PD patients and eleven healthy control (HC) participants were tested on their ability to interpret communicative intentions underlying verbal irony and lies, as well as on their ability to infer first- and second-order...

Recent research on children's inferencing has found that although adults typically adopt the pragmatic interpretation of some (implying not all), 5- to 9-year-olds often prefer the semantic interpretation of the quantifier (meaning possibly all). Do these failures reflect a breakdown of pragmatic competence or the metalinguistic demands of prior tasks? In 3 experiments, the authors used the vis...

Although there are a very large number of proposals in the literature to account for the complex distribution of the copulas ser and estar in Spanish and Portuguese (Bello 1951; Gili Gaya 1955; Querido 1976; Luján 1981; Lema 1995; Schmitt 1992, 2004; Maienborn 2000, 2003), very little is known about children’s acquisition of these two highly frequent copula verbs. The only acquisition study we ...

It is a common view that radical contextualism about linguistic meaning is incompatible with a compositional explanation of linguistic comprehension. Recently, some philosophers of language have proposed theories of ‘pragmatic’ compositionality challenging this assumption. This paper takes a close look at a prominent proposal of this kind due to François Recanati. The objective is to give a pla...

An utterance conjoining two propositions with and often conveys more information than the sum of its parts. Consider how a truth-table analysis would show that Mary got pregnant and got married is equivalent to Mary got pregnant and got married; in conversation, the order of the two conjuncts matters much more. We present three experiments that investigate both the development and on-line proce...

Language in high-functioning autism is characterized by pragmatic and semantic deficits, and people with autism have a reduced tendency to integrate information. Because the left and right inferior frontal (LIF and RIF) regions are implicated with integration of speaker information, world knowledge, and semantic knowledge, we hypothesized that abnormal functioning of the LIF and RIF regions mig...