PURPOSE High-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD) involves pragmatic impairment of language skills. Among numerous tasks for assessing pragmatic linguistic skills, idioms are important to evaluating high-functioning ASD. Nevertheless, no assessment tool has been developed with specific consideration of Korean culture. Therefore, we designed the Korean Autism Social Language Task (KASLAT) ...

To investigate the effects of etymological elaboration, contextual pragmatic clues, and lexical knowledge on L2 idioms comprehension and production, 60 male intermediate level EFL students in three groups were selected. Each group was randomly assigned to one treatment condition. Group one participants were presented with the etymological explanation of idioms. In group two, the same idioms wer...

Relevance theory challenges the traditional view of context, proposes the concept of cognitive context and a new inferential model. Its explanation of metaphor from the cognitive perspective is rather different from other metaphor theories. By discussing relevance theory’s views on context and metaphor respectively, this paper, based on the researches of contemporary scholars and pragmatists on...

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the relative timing of syntactic and pragmatic anomaly detection during sentence processing. Experiment 1 was an eye movement study. Experiment 2 employed a dual-task paradigm with compressed speech input, to put the processing routines under time pressure. Experiment 3 used compressed speech input in an anomaly monitoring task. The outcomes of th...

We present a study on the ability to comprehend conjunction, exclusive disjunction, bi-conditional and conditional. Mental model theory predicts differences in difficulty in dealing with such connectives, and it also predicts that it is easier to envisage situations that comply with an assertion than situations which do not comply. We carried out an experiment on children, adolescents and adult...

Background: This study aims to develop a test for assessing pragmatic comprehension ability in Chinese as a second language (L2). Following the framework of an argument-based approach to test validation, this study attempts to obtain backing for the Evaluation and Explanation inferences. Methods: Test items were developed based on two sources of authentic language use (i.e., field notes and a c...

This paper presents a model of pragmatic focus interpretation that is assumed to be part of a complete language comprehension model and that is inspired by Levelt’s language processing model. The model is derived from our empirical data on the role of accentuation, prosodic indicators of uncertainty and context for pragmatic focus interpretation. In its present state, the model is restricted to...

This chapter focuses on the amount of pragmatics practice needed for promoting accurate and speedy recognition and production of requestmaking forms in L2 Chinese. Over four consecutive days, an input group (n=17) and an output group (n=17) practiced using target request-making forms via computerized input-based and output-based practice activities, respectively. Meanwhile, a control group (n=1...

The aim of the present study is to compare the pragmatic ability of right- and left-hemisphere-damaged patients excluding the possible interference of linguistic deficits. To this aim, we study extralinguistic communication, that is communication performed only through gestures. The Cognitive Pragmatics Theory provides the theoretical framework: it predicts a gradient of difficulty in the compr...

We propose a framework to model human comprehension of discourse connectives. Following the Bayesian pragmatic paradigm, we advocate that discourse connectives are interpreted based on a simulation of the production process by the speaker, who, in turn, considers the ease of interpretation for the listener when choosing connectives. Evaluation against the sense annotation of the Penn Discourse ...