“Can you read my mind?” Conventionalized indirect requests and Theory of Mind abilities

Abstract

Recent proposals in pragmatics identified two types of pragmatics: linguistic-pragmatics and social-pragmatics, as comprehension seems to rely on linguistic and Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities to different extents depending on the phenomenon. In this respect, a clear picture of indirect requests (IRs) processing is lacking. Experimental works suggest non-conventionalized IRs are processed by means of a conversational implicature based on metarepresentation of the whole utterance, therefore belonging to social-pragmatics. However, it is unclear whether this applies to conventionalized IRs, which are globally processed faster than non-conventionalized IRs. Conventionalized IRs are either conversational implicatures requiring ToM, though “short-circuited” (but still derived globally); or a linguistic-pragmatics phenomenon whose processing is triggered locally. Our study investigates to what extent mentalizing is involved in their comprehension. Ninety-one Italian adults (mean age = 35.85(9.85)) performed a self-paced region-by-region reading task where Can you…? forms were presented in a directive, non-directive, and sarcastic condition. Reading times were calculated per sentence and per sentence-region. ToM abilities were also tested. Results suggest that conventionalized IRs processing starts locally, triggered by the Can you. Individual ToM differences had an impact, but mainly on the Can you sentence-region. These findings seem to support a view of conventionalized IRs as a linguistic-pragmatics phenomenon.