Monica Bucciarelli

How children comprehend speech acts and communicative gestures

We propose a framework for explaining difference in difficulty of various pragmatic phenomena. In particular, we investigate the ability to comprehend direct, indirect, deceitful, and ironic communicative acts. Our main prediction is that there is a gradation of difficulty in their comprehension. Such a prediction is grounded on the assumptions that the various phenomena involve both mental representations of different complexity and different inferential load. A further prediction is that a communicative act has in principle the same difficulty of comprehension, whether performed through speech acts or communicative gestures. The underlying assumption is that the construction of the meaning of a communicative act is independent of the input modalities. We validate our predictions through an experiment on 160 children, with 40 in each of the following age groups: 2.6 to 3 years, 3.6 to 4 years, 4.6 to 5.6 years, and 6 to 7 years. The results confirm the predicted gradation of difficulty both for the different sorts of speech acts and for the communicative gestures. Also, the results, when broken down by each phenomenon, show that participants performed equally well in speech acts and in communicative gestures. We conclude with a discussion of the possible implications of our results for linguistic and gestural communication research.

Developmental pragmatics in normal and abnormal children.

We propose a critical review of current theories of developmental pragmatics. The underlying assumption is that such a theory ought to account for both normal and abnormal development. From a clinical point of view, we are concerned with the effects of brain damage on the emergence of pragmatic competence. In particular, the paper deals with direct speech acts, indirect speech acts, irony, and deceit in children with head injury, closed head injury, hydrocephalus, focal brain damage, and autism. Since no single theory covers systematically the emergence of pragmatic capacity in normal children, it is not surprising that we have not found a systematic account of deficits in the communicative performance of brain injured children. In our view, the challenge for a pragmatic theory is the determination of the normal developmental pattern within which different pragmatic phenomena may find a precise role. Such a framework of normal behavior would then permit the systematic study of abnormal pragmatic development.

Naïve deontics: a theory of meaning, representation, and reasoning.

Deontic assertions concern what one ought to do, may do, and ought not to do. This paper proposes a theory of their meanings and of how these meanings are represented in mental models. The meanings of deontic assertions refer to sets of permissible and impermissible states. An experiment corroborated the ability of individuals to list these states. The most salient were those corresponding to the mental models of the assertions. When individuals reason, they rely on mental models, which do not make all states explicit. The theory predicts the most frequent conclusions drawn from deontic premises. It also predicts the occurrence of illusory inferences from assertions of permission, i.e., inferences that seem highly plausible but that are in fact invalid. Assertions of prohibitions, according to the theory, should reduce the illusions. Further experiments corroborated these predictions.

Development of syllogistic reasoning

We investigated the syllogistic reasoning of children 9-10 years of age, adolescents, and adults. Their performance on five tasks that theoretically might measure components of such reasoning was examined: the interpretation of quantifiers such as some and all; the referential integration of assertions; the search for counterexamples to generalizations; the perception of identical shapes within figures; and the processing capacity of working memory. Syllogistic ability improved reliably with age, though even the youngest subjects were able to draw valid conclusions well above chance to one-model syllogisms. Performance on two of the component tasks also improved reliably with age: the detection of identities, and the capacity of working memory. Multiple regressions showed that performance on these two tasks also accounted for some of the variance in syllogistic reasoning. Performance on the other three tasks was at about adult level by the age of 9. We accordingly examined performance with a group of 7-year-old children and discovered that they also performed at better than chance with one-model syllogisms. Our results support three main conclusions: young children are capable of syllogistic reasoning (contrary to the claims of Inhelder & Piaget, 1964); there is a significant development of ability from childhood to adulthood; and it is possible to identify some of the major components of this improvement.

Neuropragmatics: Extralinguistic pragmatic ability is better preserved in left-hemisphere-damaged patients than in right-hemisphere-damaged patients

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 comprehension of different pragmatic phenomena, that should be valid independently of the use of language or gestures as communicative means. An experiment involving 10 healthy individuals, 10 right- and 9 left-hemisphere-damaged patients, shows that pragmatic performance is better preserved in left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) patients than in right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) patients.

The Deep Versus the Shallow: Effects of Co-Speech Gestures in Learning From Discourse

This study concerned the role of gestures that accompany discourse in deep learning processes. We assumed that co-speech gestures favor the construction of a complete mental representation of the discourse content, and we tested the predictions that a discourse accompanied by gestures, as compared with a discourse not accompanied by gestures, should result in better recollection of conceptual information, a greater number of discourse-based inferences drawn from the information explicitly stated in the discourse, and poorer recognition of verbatim of the discourse. The results of three experiments confirmed these predictions.

The fundamental context categories in understanding communicative intention

We propose a taxonomy of the different categories of context which contribute to reconstruct the communicative intention of a speaker. In particular, we investigate the following categories: Access, Space, Time, Discourse, Move, and Status. We propose that different contexts pertaining to the same category make the hearer assign different communicative meanings to the same expressive act. We validate our expectations through an experiment on three groups of children aged 3–7 years. The results confirm our predictions and reveal that different context categories and within them, different contexts, play different roles in the reconstruction of the communicative intentions in children belonging to the different age groups.

Kinematic mental simulations in abduction and deduction

Significance We developed a theory of how mental simulations underlie the abductions of informal algorithms and deductions from these algorithms. Experiments tested the theory’s predictions using a task for the investigation of how naive individuals think about algorithms. Participants solved problems, abduced and described in their own words algorithms that solved such problems, and deduced the consequences of algorithms. Difficulty in formulating an algorithm and deducing its consequences depended on the algorithm’s Kolmogorov complexity. Results corroborated the use of kinematic mental models in creating and testing informal algorithms and showed that individuals differ reliably in the ability to carry out these tasks. We present a theory, and its computer implementation, of how mental simulations underlie the abductions of informal algorithms and deductions from these algorithms. Three experiments tested the theory’s predictions, using an environment of a single railway track and a siding. This environment is akin to a universal Turing machine, but it is simple enough for nonprogrammers to use. Participants solved problems that required use of the siding to rearrange the order of cars in a train (experiment 1). Participants abduced and described in their own words algorithms that solved such problems for trains of any length, and, as the use of simulation predicts, they favored “while-loops” over “for-loops” in their descriptions (experiment 2). Given descriptions of loops of procedures, participants deduced the consequences for given trains of six cars, doing so without access to the railway environment (experiment 3). As the theory predicts, difficulty in rearranging trains depends on the numbers of moves and cars to be moved, whereas in formulating an algorithm and deducing its consequences, it depends on the Kolmogorov complexity of the algorithm. Overall, the results corroborated the use of a kinematic mental model in creating and testing informal algorithms and showed that individuals differ reliably in the ability to carry out these tasks.

Learning from text benefits from enactment.

Classical studies on enactment have highlighted the beneficial effects of gestures performed in the encoding phase on memory for words and sentences, for both adults and children. In the present investigation, we focused on the role of enactment for learning from scientific texts among primary-school children. We assumed that enactment would favor the construction of a mental model of the text, and we verified the derived predictions that gestures at the time of encoding would result in greater numbers of correct recollections and discourse-based inferences at recall, as compared to no gestures (Exp. 1), and in a bias to confound paraphrases of the original text with the verbatim text in a recognition test (Exp. 2). The predictions were confirmed; hence, we argue in favor of a theoretical framework that accounts for the beneficial effects of enactment on memory for texts.

The Inferential Chain makes the Difference between Familiar and Novel Figurative Expressions.

The present investigation focuses on childrens ability to comprehend the communicative meaning of figurative expressions. We advance a theoretical framework where the length of the inferential chain accounts for the difference in difficulty of reconstructing the communicative meaning of familiar and novel figurative expressions. The results of Experiment 1, involving 90 children from 7- to 10-year-olds, confirm our prediction. Experiment 2, involving 54 children of the same age, does not support an alternative, syntactic, explanation for our results. Experiment 3, also involving 54 children from 7 to 10 years old, replicates the results of the two previous experiments in a single experiment. The overall results strengthen our assumptions: The length of the inferential chain, but not the syntactic complexity involved, is the factor that better explains the difference in difficulty of reconstructing the communicative meaning of the familiar and novel figurative expressions investigated. The overall results are discussed in relation to the relevant experimental literature.