Metapsychological awareness of comprehension and epistemic vigilance of L2 communication in interlanguage pragmatic development

Abstract

L2 learners may make interpretive mistakes at both the explicit and the implicit levels of communication. They may not construct the right lower- or higher-level explicatures, turn explicatures into unintended implicatures, miss implicit contents or recover alternative implicatures. Defective mastery of the L2 code, lack of the necessary pragmalinguistic and/or sociopragmatic knowledge, and selection of an inadequate processing strategy may cause learners to arrive at unintended interpretations, which may accidentally appear relevant or irrelevant. If they behave as naïvely optimistic hearers and trust unintended interpretations, they could end up making wrong attributions of beliefs and intentions. Therefore, this paper argues that instruction in L2 pragmatics should develop a necessary meta-psychological awareness of comprehension as a way to develop or fine-tune learners’ epistemic vigilance (Mascaro and Sperber, 2009; Sperber et al., 2010) of the reliability of the interpretive routes they follow and the believability of the interpretations they arrive at. It also claims that epistemic vigilance is essential when comprehension skills are underdeveloped or not as sophisticated as those of natives, since it may trigger a more sophisticated processing strategy that enables hearers to avoid or overcome misunderstandings, namely cautious optimism.