Mikhail Kissine

Children with Autism Understand Indirect Speech Acts: Evidence from a Semi-Structured Act-Out Task

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder are often said to present a global pragmatic impairment. However, there is some observational evidence that context-based comprehension of indirect requests may be preserved in autism. In order to provide experimental confirmation to this hypothesis, indirect speech act comprehension was tested in a group of 15 children with autism between 7 and 12 years and a group of 20 typically developing children between 2:7 and 3:6 years. The aim of the study was to determine whether children with autism can display genuinely contextual understanding of indirect requests. The experiment consisted of a three-pronged semi-structured task involving Mr Potato Head. In the first phase a declarative sentence was uttered by one adult as an instruction to put a garment on a Mr Potato Head toy; in the second the same sentence was uttered as a comment on a picture by another speaker; in the third phase the same sentence was uttered as a comment on a picture by the first speaker. Children with autism complied with the indirect request in the first phase and demonstrated the capacity to inhibit the directive interpretation in phases 2 and 3. TD children had some difficulty in understanding the indirect instruction in phase 1. These results call for a more nuanced view of pragmatic dysfunction in autism.

Locutionary, Illocutionary, Perlocutionary

J. L. Austins three-prong distinction between locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts is discussed in terms of D. Davidsons theory of action. Perlocutionary acts refer to the relation between the utterance and its causal effects on the addressee. In contrast, illocutionary and locutionary acts are alternative descriptions of the utterance. The possibility of conceiving of locutionary acts as expressing propositions under a certain mode of presentation is discussed. Different ways to define illocutionary acts without encroaching on the locutionary or perlocutionary territory are considered.

Pragmatics as Metacognitive Control

The term “pragmatics” is often used to refer without distinction, on one hand, to the contextual selection of interpretation norms and, on the other hand, to the context-sensitive processes guided by these norms. Pragmatics in the first acception depends on language-independent contextual factors that can, but need not, involve Theory of Mind; in the second acception, pragmatics is a language-specific metacognitive process, which may unfold at an unconscious level without involving any mental state (meta-)representation. Distinguishing between these two kinds of ways context drives the interpretation of communicative stimuli helps dissolve the dispute between proponents of an entirely Gricean pragmatics and those who claim that some pragmatic processes do not depend on mind-reading capacities. According to the model defended in this paper, the typology of pragmatic processes is not entirely determined by a hierarchy of meanings, but by contextually set norms of interpretation.

Will Dutch become Flemish? Autonomous developments in Belgian Dutch

Abstract In this paper a series of studies of standard Dutch pronunciation in Belgium and the Netherlands is presented. The research is based on two speech corpora: a diachronic corpus of radio speech (1935–1995) and a synchronic corpus of Belgian and Netherlandic standard Dutch from different regions at the turn of the millennium. It is shown that two divergent pronunciation standards have been developing, but it is argued that the divergence will not create two autonomous standard languages. As such, Dutch is not different from its two closest pluricentric neighbors, German and English.

Compliance with requests by children with autism: the impact of sentence type

This study assesses the extent to which children with autism understand requests performed with grammatically non-imperative sentence types. Ten children with autism were videotaped in naturalistic conditions. Four grammatical sentence types were distinguished: imperative, declarative, interrogative and sub-sentential. For each category, the proportion of requests complied with significantly exceeded the proportion of requests not complied with, and no difference across categories was found. These results show that children with autism do not rely exclusively on the linguistic form to interpret an utterance as a request.

Metaphorical projection, subjectification and English speech act verbs

Previous approaches to non-illocutionary uses of speech act verbs (SAVs) concentrated on commissive verbs like promise and threaten, claiming that their non-illocutionary uses result from a subjectification process, and that they therefore describe a subjective relation. Some uses of assertive and directive SAVs do not conform to this pattern: they involve a metaphorical projection whose source domain is the basic level of cognitive apprehension where directive speech acts are perceived as manifestations of an internal necessity and assertive speech acts as direct signs of states of affairs. It is argued that subjectification approaches went wrong when characterising non-illocutionary uses of commissive SAVs in purely subjective terms. Non-illocutionary uses of promise and threaten are better accounted for by a metaphorical projection whose source domain is the conceptualisation of commissive speech acts as highly reliable signs of future states of affairs.

When terminology matters: The imperative as a comparative concept

Abstract The imperative should be thought of as a comparative concept, defined as a sentence type whose only prototypical function is the performance of the whole range of directive speech acts. Furthermore, for a non-second-person form to count as an imperative it must be homogeneous with the second-person form, thereby allowing true imperative paradigms to be distinguished from those that recruit alternative structures. This definition of the imperative sentence type allows more accurate crosslinguistic analysis of imperative paradigms, and provides principled grounds for distinguishing between imperative and so-called “hortative” and “jussive” forms. It also helps to clarify the irrealis – or better – potential status of imperatives, and suggests an explanation for the crosslinguistic variability in the non-directive occurrence of imperatives in good wishes.

Impact of Acute Sleep Deprivation on Sarcasm Detection

There is growing evidence that sleep plays a pivotal role on health, cognition and emotional regulation. However, the interplay between sleep and social cognition remains an uncharted research area. In particular, little is known about the impact of sleep deprivation on sarcasm detection, an ability which, once altered, may hamper everyday social interactions. The aim of this study is to determine whether sleep-deprived participants are as able as sleep-rested participants to adopt another perspective in gauging sarcastic statements. At 9am, after a whole night of sleep (n = 15) or a sleep deprivation night (n = 15), participants had to read the description of an event happening to a group of friends. An ambiguous voicemail message left by one of the friends on anothers phone was then presented, and participants had to decide whether the recipient would perceive the message as sincere or as sarcastic. Messages were uttered with a neutral intonation and were either: (1) sarcastic from both the participant’s and the addressee’s perspectives (i.e. both had access to the relevant background knowledge to gauge the message as sarcastic), (2) sarcastic from the participant’s but not from the addressee’s perspective (i.e. the addressee lacked context knowledge to detect sarcasm) or (3) sincere. A fourth category consisted in messages sarcastic from both the participant’s and from the addressee’s perspective, uttered with a sarcastic tone. Although sleep-deprived participants were as accurate as sleep-rested participants in interpreting the voice message, they were also slower. Blunted reaction time was not fully explained by generalized cognitive slowing after sleep deprivation; rather, it could reflect a compensatory mechanism supporting normative accuracy level in sarcasm understanding. Introducing prosodic cues compensated for increased processing difficulties in sarcasm detection after sleep deprivation. Our findings support the hypothesis that sleep deprivation might damage the flow of social interactions by slowing perspective-taking processes.

Utterance interpretation and cognitive models

Reconciles armchair theorising about the semantics-pragmatics interface with hypotheses about cognitive architecture. This book concerns with the cognitive counterparts of lexical meanings. It also explores the links between moods and forces. It looks at the epistemological status of semantic theory from the point of view of human psychology.

Selective Pragmatic Impairment in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Indirect Requests Versus Irony

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is often described as being characterised by a uniform pragmatic impairment. However, recent evidence suggests that some areas of pragmatic functioning are preserved. This study seeks to determine to which extent context-based derivation of non-linguistically encoded meaning is functional in ASD. We compare the performance of 24 adults with ASD, and matched neuro-typical adults in two act-out pragmatic tasks. The first task examines generation of indirect request interpretations, and the second the comprehension of irony. Intact contextual comprehension of indirect requests contrasts with marked difficulties in understanding irony. These results suggest that preserved pragmatics in ASD is limited to egocentric processing of context, which does not rely on assumptions about the speaker’s mental states.