Fourth-call grants
The cognitive foundations of pragmatic development
Kyriakos Antoniou, Napoleon Katsos, Kleanthes Grohmann, Stella Vorka & Maria Cambanaros
Developmental studies have shown that children of early school age typically have difficulties with Gricean conversational implicatures (e.g. Noveck, 2001; Vosniadou, 1987). Despite discussions in the literature on...
Learning about contrastive conjunctives from individuals with brain damage
Noga Balaban, Yoad Winter & Naama Friedmann
We propose to test the way patients who suffered brain damage and as a result show impaired Theory of Mind (TOM) ability understand contrastive structures. The rationale of the study is to test the theoretical analysis...
Steps of the mind over figurative meanings II - Conceptual vs. grammatical aspects
Valentina Bambini, Marta Ghio & Petra Schumacher
This project represents a follow-up study on previous research conducted in the past two years under the auspices of EURO-XPRAG in connection with a travel grant as part of the first call for projects. In the ...
Optimal Reasoning about Referential Expressions in Production and Comprehension
Judith Degen, Michael Franke & Gerhard Jäger
Reference to objects is pivotal in communication and a central concern of linguistic pragmatics. If interlocutors were ideal reasoners, referential language use would look roughly like this: the speaker would choose the...
What do different psycholinguistic measures tell us about the processing of metonymy?
Steven Frisson, Andrea Krott, Petra Schumacher & Hanna Weiland
The psycholinguistic findings from the comprehension of metonymy have been mixed. While eye movement measures have consistently revealed no processing cost for established metonymic expressions relative to ...
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Why imply something when you could say it explicitly?
Napoleon Katsos, Jessica Soltys & Marina Terkourafi
Along with traditional politeness-based motivations for indirectness, Pinker and colleagues (Pinker, Nowak & Lee, 2008; Lee & Pinker, 2010) recently proposed a distinct motivation, that of ‘plausible deniability’. The ...
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An experimentally-based theory of direct and indirect denial
Laia Mayol, Elena Castroviejo-Miro & Elizabeth Allyn Smith
Participants in a conversation can object to something uttered by another participant in a number of ways and for a number of reasons. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in how the particular denial uttered ...
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The neural basis of irony processing
Ira Noveck, Simone G. Shamay-Tsoory & Nicola Spotorno
It is now well established that communicators interpret others’ mental states through what has been called “Theory of Mind” (ToM; Premack & Woodruff, 1978). This refers to a mentalizing ability that allows a listener...
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Local exhaustification: evaluating competing accounts in an act-out paradigm
Ye Tian, Richard Breheny & Bob van Tiel
Local exhaustification (LE) is the phenomenon where it seems that the effect of adding a quantity implicature occurs at an embedded site in a sentence. For example, (1a) can be understood as per the gloss in (1b) ...
