Speaker's Communicative Intention Research Articles

Involvement of the anterior insula and frontal operculum during wh-question comprehension of wh-in-situ Korean language.

In this research, we employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the neurological basis for understanding wh-questions in wh-in-situ languages such as Korean, where wh-elements maintain their original positions instead of moving explicitly within the sentence. Our hypothesis centered on the role of the salience and attention network in comprehending wh-questions in wh-in-situ languages, such as the discernment of wh-elements, the demarcation between interrogative types, and the allocation of cognitive resources towards essential constituents vis-à-vis subordinate elements in order to capture the speaker's communicative intent. We explored subject and object wh-questions and scrambled wh-questions, contrasting them with yes/no questions in Korean. Increased activation was observed in the left anterior insula and bilateral frontal operculum, irrespective of the wh-position or scrambling of wh-element. These results suggest the interaction between the salience and attentional system and the syntactic linguistic system, particularly the left anterior insula and bilateral frontal operculum, in comprehending wh-questions in wh-in-situ languages.

Понимание коммуникативных намерений говорящего и популярность в кругу сверстников у детей младшего школьного возраста

<p>The aim of this study was to explore the role of the theory of mind – the ability to attribute mental states to other people in order to explain their behavior – in popularity with peers and in the social competence of children of primary school age. The participants were 92 children aged 9–12 years (M=9,97; SD=0,80; 47 girls). We used the F. Happé “Strange Stories” test, used to study children's understanding of the speaker's communicative intentions in situations of ambiguously understood social interactions, to assess theory of mind. The popularity of children in the group was studied using a sociometric method. For an external evaluation teachers assessed the social behavior of children and adolescents using a specially designed questionnaire. The results obtained testify to the relationship of children’s theory of mind with both their popularity with peers, and with their social competence as a whole. The understanding of communicative intentions in difficult social situations by children is related with both peer preference for socializing and perceived popularity among peers. An external assessment of social competence among primary school age children by teachers has shown that children who are more successful in understanding the communicative intentions of other people are rated by adults as more popular among their peers, while the less successful ones are those who more often become the object of ridicule and often fall under the negative influence of others.</p>

We need to talk about Hearer's Meaning!

Mainstream theories of meaning in communication have traditionally centered the speaker's communicative intention. The centrality of Speaker's Meaning has, however, also been subjected to a great deal of criticism. We argue that it is time to take much more seriously the notion of Hearer's Meaning as distinct from Speaker's Meaning, even where the latter is conceived of as interactionally negotiated. Our principal contention is that, in terms of real-world effects, synchronically but also diachronically, Hearer's Meaning is, in fact, criterial. We propose a model of Hearer's Meaning as derived from seven sources – H's framing(s) of (different parts of) the speech event; H's assumptions about the conventional meanings of words and phrases; the sequential placement of the utterance; H's perception of S's identities; H's social relationship with S; H's social relationships with third parties; and finally, H's assumptions regarding S's intentions (if any) – and exemplify its application with the help of an extended Twitter thread. The contribution of each of these seven sources to Hearer's meaning is not necessarily fixed at the start of a given interactional episode and may vary according to the context of utterance. Moreover, the assessment of each of the sources may not be the same for all participants. As a result, meanings derived by different interactants need not be (near-)identical for them to judge a communicative exchange as having been successful. In other words, multiple parallel meanings are possible.

REALIZATION OF IMPLICIT WARNING IN POLITICAL INTERVIEW

The topic of the present article concerns the ways of expressing the speaker's communicative intent and highlighting the perlocutionary effect of the discursive move in political discourse. The aim of the research is to study the ways of making an impact on the audience in the communicative context of mass media communication. For the purpose of analysis the transcript of a political interview published on the website of the news program Democracy Now is taken. The language material is analysed with the application of contextual-semantic and pragmatic methods of analysis. The study of the dialogic moves of the partners in the question-answer sequences provides ample grounds to suggest that the conversational unit under analysis can be interpreted as a case of macro-warning which creates the perlocutionary effect of alarming. Furthermore, both participants contribute to creating the integrative communicative intent of the interview.

The Logical Pragmatics of Arguments in Argumentation

Logic is understood so far as a product perspective, either formal or informal. The topic is still, though interesting, imprecise, sketchy and problematic. Besides, the relevance of logic to linguistics has not been explained. This research focuses on dealing with logic as a product and a process. It introduces how logic is relevant to understanding language. Logic is surely not irrelevant to real human language. In this research, we coin 'logical pragmatics' to refer to "the structure of an argumentation and its parts used by the speaker for the purpose of persuasion to have an effect in the addressee and passive audience”. As such, the research mainly aims at providing a definition of "logical pragmatics" as well as developing an ideal model for it. To accomplish this aim, the research studies what this approach entails and the relevance of logic and pragmatically oriented contributions to the field of argument and argumentation. The study mainly concluded that in real communication, simple logical relations become very complex and part of a wider context where we have a speaker's communicative intention, a hearer's communicative inference, and context.

"dit en dat" en "al daai goed": 'n Korpuslinguistiese ondersoek na pragmatiese merkers in gesproke Afrikaans

Pragmatiese merkers is 'n frekwente verskynsel van gesproke taal. Daar is egter nog baie min studies onderneem na pragmatiese merkers in Omgangsafrikaans. Pragmatiese merkers tree op as belangrike kontekstualiseringswenke deurdat dit gespreksgenote rig in terme van die relevansie van die uiting, en die spreker in staat stel om, op bondige wyse, 'n houding teenoor die proposisie van die uiting te openbaar. In hierdie studie word gefokus op 'n bepaalde tipe pragmatiese merker, naamlik vaekategoriemerkers (VKM's). Vaekategoriemerkers in Afrikaans is 'n meerwoordige leksikale eenheid, of woordkluster, wat as pragmatiese merker optree, byvoorbeeld "en goed" en "of iets". Hierdie ondersoek het ten doel om aan die hand van korpuslinguistiese metodes te bepaal watter vaekategoriemerkers in Omgangsafrikaans gebruik word en watter pragmatiese funksies dit verrig.

Ensino de gramática: uma proposta de análise das relações entre partes do texto

Este estudo, com base em uma visão funcionalista de língua, apresenta uma proposta de análise da relação conclusiva que se estabelece por meio das conjunções então e portanto, no intuito de oferecer uma contribuição que mostre a relevância do ensino de gramática pautado nos usos da língua. Os resultados demonstram que há três diferentes funções na relação conclusiva estabelecidas por meio das conjunções mencionada (conclusão, consequência e resumo), distinguíveis entre si devido, notadamente, à intenção comunicativa do falante na interação. A pesquisa demonstrou a relevância de se observar um fenômeno linguístico a partir de exemplos autênticos de uso da língua, e não apenas de orações prototípicas encontradas nas gramáticas tradicionais.

I see what you meant to say: Anticipating speech errors during online sentence processing.

Everyday speech is rife with errors and disfluencies, yet processing what we hear usually feels effortless. How does the language comprehension system accomplish such an impressive feat? The current experiment tests the hypothesis that listeners draw on relevant contextual and linguistic cues to anticipate speech errors and mentally correct them, even before receiving an explicit correction from the speaker. In the current visual-world eye-tracking experiment, we monitored participants' eye movements to objects in a display while they listened to utterances containing reparandum-repair speech errors (e.g., . . . his cat, uh I mean his dog . . .). The contextual plausibility of the misspoken word and the certainty with which the speaker uttered this word were systematically manipulated. Results showed that listeners immediately exploited these cues to generate top-down expectations regarding the speaker's communicative intention. Crucially, listeners used these expectations to constrain the bottom-up speech input and mentally correct perceived speech errors, even before the speaker initiated the correction. The results provide powerful evidence regarding the joint process of correcting speech errors that involves both the speaker and the listener. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

REALIZATION OF EVALUATIVE UTTERANCE IN DIFFERENT TYPES OF CONTEXT

The article is focused on the problem of the interconnection of the context and the evaluative utterance. Evaluation of different world’s fragments is, of course, a considerable part of human cognitive activity. Special attention is paid to signals-indicators, which can be linguistic and extralinguistic in nature. The present paper highlights the actualization of evaluative utterance in micrcontext, and macrocontexts of the minimum, average and maximum size. In the process of realization of the evaluative utterance within the frame of micrcontext, the linguistic context is based on signals-indicators, while the structure of the stylistic context consists of various semasiological and syntactic expressive means and stylistic devices. While updating the evaluation in macrocontexts of the minimum and average size, the linguistic context is frequently mixed, and the configuration of the stylistic context in most cases includes different semasiological and syntactic expressive means and stylistic devices; but the macrocontext of the maximum size is linguistic, and the stylistic context is only its background part. The results obtained confirm the idea that the correlation between the evaluative utterance and context helps to understand encoded in the evaluative utterances presuppositions of the communication that is the speaker's communicative intentions associated with his epistemic state.

The Understanding of Communicative Intentions in Children with Severe-to-Profound Hearing Loss.

The ability to distinguish lies from sincere false statements requires understanding a speaker's communicative intentions and is argued to develop through linguistic interaction. We tested whether this ability was delayed in 26 children with severe-to-profound hearing loss who, based on vocabulary size, were thought to have relatively limited access to linguistic exchanges compared to typically hearing peers (n = 93). Children were presented with toy bears who either lied or made a false statement sincerely. Despite identifying speakers' knowledge/ignorance, deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) children were delayed in identifying lies and sincere false statements when matched for chronological age. When matched for receptive vocabulary, observed discrepancies diminished. Deaf children who experienced early access to conversations with their deaf parents demonstrated no delay. Findings suggest limited access to linguistic exchanges delays the development of a key pragmatic skill.

Irony and Parody in a Spanish Translation of Fowles’ "The French Lieutenant’s Woman": A Relevance-Theoretical Approach

This paper seeks to explore the translation of irony and parody. The theoretical framework followed will be relevance-theory, which has highlighted that the expression of a certain attitude may be common to these two figures. The work under analysis will be a Spanish rendering of Fowles' The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which criticism has regarded as a parody of nineteenth-century Victorian fiction. It will be assumed that for readers to be able to cope with the meaning of parody and irony, they will have to go beyond the propositional content expressed in the utterances in which these resources are found. Furthermore, their translation will necessarily require strategies that go beyond the “literal” level of the words through which irony and parody are expressed. Our contention is that the proposals put forward by relevance theory may be useful in this respect, since they stress the importance of the inferential recognition of the speaker's communicative intention. Both such recognition and its reflection in the target text, in such a way that it requires no extra processing effort from the readership are the main aspects to be faced by the translator.

A Gricean Theory of Malaprops

AbstractGricean intentionalists hold that what a speaker says and means by a linguistic utterance is determined by the speaker's communicative intention. On this view, one cannot really say anything without meaning it as well. Conventionalists argue, however, that malapropisms provide powerful counterexamples to this claim. I present two arguments against the conventionalist and sketch a new Gricean theory of speech errors, called the misarticulation theory. On this view, malapropisms are understood as a special case of mispronunciation. I argue that the Gricean theory is supported by empirical work in phonetics and phonology and, also, that conventionalism inevitably fails to do this work justice. I conclude, from this, that the conventionalist fails to show that malapropisms constitute a counterexample to a Gricean theory.

Pragmatic markers in dialogical discourse

Abstract The article presents a study of dialogical discourse operators defined as pragmatic markers. The author introduces a list of special English pragmatic markers – words that are united by the same implicit semantics of contrast. Pragmatic markers of the selected group are used in dialogical discourse as a means of realization of the speaker's communicative intention and serve as illocutionary indicators of indirect speech acts. They are also important components of indirect communicative strategies and tactics.

Children Increase Their Sensitivity to a Speaker's Nonlinguistic Cues Following a Communicative Breakdown.

Bilingual children regularly face communicative challenges when speakers switch languages. To cope with such challenges, children may attempt to discern a speaker's communicative intent, thereby heightening their sensitivity to nonverbal communicative cues. Two studies examined whether such communication breakdowns increase sensitivity to nonverbal cues. English-speaking monolingual (n = 64) and bilingual (n = 54) 3- to 4-year-olds heard instructions in either English only or English mixed with a foreign language. Later, children played a hiding game that relied on nonverbal cues. Hearing a foreign language switch improved both monolingual and bilingual children's use of these cues. Moreover, bilinguals with more prior code-switching exposure outperformed those with less prior code-switching exposure. Children's short-term strategies to repair communication breakdowns may evolve into a more generalizable set of skills.

Ventral and Dorsal Pathways for Prosodic Intentions

Event Abstract Back to Event Ventral and Dorsal Pathways for Prosodic Intentions Daniela Sammler1, 2*, Marie-Hélène Grosbras2, Patricia E. G. Bestelmeyer3 and Pascal Belin2, 4 1 Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany 2 University of Glasgow, Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, UK 3 Bangor University , School of Psychology, UK 4 University of Montréal and McGill University, Canada Prosody - on top of its linguistic and emotional roles - serves an interpersonal function in speech: to convey the speaker's communicative intentions. Research on the neural bases of prosodic intentions requires a fusion of the fields of neurolinguistics and social neurosciences. The present data outline (i) a right-hemispheric dual-stream account of prosodic comprehension, in analogy to prevailing dual-stream models of language comprehension in the left hemisphere; and (ii) motor simulation in the dorsal stream as a conceptual interface between prosodic comprehension and the decoding of the speaker's stimulus-linked intentions. In two separate functional/diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) experiments, participants categorized the prosodic intention ("naming" vs "asking"; experimental task) or the word-initial consonant (/bear/ or /pear/; control task) of single word utterances that varied along a pitch contour (falling to rising) or phoneme continuum (/b/ to /p/). The prosody task (vs control) activated (i) right posterior and anterior superior temporal sulcus (p/aSTS) connected via the middle longitudinal fasciculus (ventral pathway), and (ii) right pSTS and laryngeal premotor cortex (PMC) connected via the arcuate fasciculus (dorsal pathway). (iii) Functional relevance of the dorsal pathway was demonstrated by reduced performance in the prosody (but not control) task after TMS-induced inhibition of right PMC. These data draw a dual-stream picture of prosodic comprehension built on complementary mechanisms: A ventral WHAT pathway to map vocal pitch patterns to meaning by evaluating auditory features, and a dorsal HOW pathway to recognize a speaker's vocal action by covertly mapping the perceived pitch contour to laryngeal gestures. Following motor simulation accounts of social cognition, this latter mechanism may ground the understanding of the speaker's (low-level) intention conveyed by speech prosody. Keywords: Larynx, Intention, Motor Simulation, functional MRI, diffusion MRI, pragmatics, TMS, Prosody, dorsal pathway, ventral pathway, speech act Conference: XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII), Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, 27 Jul - 31 Jul, 2014. Presentation Type: Oral Presentation Topic: Language Citation: Sammler D, Grosbras M, Bestelmeyer P and Belin P (2015). Ventral and Dorsal Pathways for Prosodic Intentions. Conference Abstract: XII International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON-XII). doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2015.217.00058 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 19 Feb 2015; Published Online: 24 Apr 2015. * Correspondence: Dr. Daniela Sammler, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, daniela.sammler@ae.mpg.de Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Daniela Sammler Marie-Hélène Grosbras Patricia E. G. Bestelmeyer Pascal Belin Google Daniela Sammler Marie-Hélène Grosbras Patricia E. G. Bestelmeyer Pascal Belin Google Scholar Daniela Sammler Marie-Hélène Grosbras Patricia E. G. Bestelmeyer Pascal Belin PubMed Daniela Sammler Marie-Hélène Grosbras Patricia E. G. Bestelmeyer Pascal Belin Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Young children use shared experience to interpret definite reference

We investigated whether children at the ages of two and three years understand that a speaker's use of the definite article specifies a referent that is in common ground between speaker and listener. An experimenter and a child engaged in joint actions in which the experimenter chose one of three similar objects of the same category to perform an action. In subsequent interactions children were asked to get 'the X' or 'a X'. When children were instructed with the definite article they chose the shared object significantly more often than when they were instructed with the indefinite article in which case children's choice was at chance. The findings show that in their third year children use shared experiences to interpret the speaker's communicative intention underlying her referential choice. The results are discussed with respect to children's representation of linguistic categories and the role of joint action for establishing common ground.

A bilingual advantage in how children integrate multiple cues to understand a speaker's referential intent

In everyday communication, speakers make use of a variety of contextual and gestural cues to modulate the meaning of an utterance. Young children have difficulty in integrating multiple communicative cues when some of them have to be interpreted differently depending on other co-occurring cues. However, bilingual children, who regularly experience communicative challenges that demand greater attention and flexibility, may be more adept in integrating multiple cues to understand a speaker's communicative intent. We replicated Nurmsoo and Bloom's (2008) procedure with three-year-old monolingual and bilingual children using a procedure in which they saw two novel objects while the experimenter could see only one. The experimenter looked at the object she could see and said either “There's the [novel-word!]” or “Where's the [novel-word]?”. Compared to monolinguals, bilingual preschoolers were better able to integrate the semantics of “where”, perceptual access of the experimenter, and the nonlinguistic context of the game to successfully differentiate the speaker's communicative intent.

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders Do Not Use Social Stereotypes in Irony Comprehension

Social and communication impairments are part of the essential diagnostic criteria used to define Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). Difficulties in appreciating non-literal speech, such as irony in ASDs have been explained as due to impairments in social understanding and in recognizing the speaker’s communicative intention. It has been shown that social-interactional factors, such as a listener’s beliefs about the speaker’s attitudinal propensities (e.g., a tendency to use sarcasm, to be mocking, less sincere and more prone to criticism), as conveyed by an occupational stereotype, do influence a listener’s interpretation of potentially ironic remarks. We investigate the effect of occupational stereotype on irony detection in adults with High Functioning Autism or Asperger Syndrome (HFA/AS) and a comparison group of typically developed adults. We used a series of verbally presented stories containing ironic or literal utterances produced by a speaker having either a “sarcastic” or a “non-sarcastic” occupation. Although individuals with HFA/AS were able to recognize ironic intent and occupational stereotypes when the latter are made salient, stereotype information enhanced irony detection and modulated its social meaning (i.e., mockery and politeness) only in comparison participants. We concluded that when stereotype knowledge is not made salient, it does not automatically affect pragmatic communicative processes in individuals with HFA/AS.

3‐Year‐Old Children Make Relevance Inferences in Indirect Verbal Communication

Three studies investigated 3-year-old children's ability to determine a speaker's communicative intent when the speaker's overt utterance related to that intent only indirectly. Studies 1 and 2 examined children's comprehension of indirectly stated requests (e.g., "I find Xs good" can imply, in context, a request for X; N = 32). Study 3 investigated 3- and 4-year-old children's and adults' (N = 52) comprehension of the implications of a speaker responding to an offer by mentioning an action's fulfilled or unfulfilled precondition (e.g., responding to an offer of cereal by stating that we have no milk implies rejection of the cereal). In all studies, 3-year-old children were able to make the relevance inference necessary to integrate utterances meaningfully into the ongoing context.

The duality of speaker meaning: What makes self-repair, insincerity, and sarcasm possible

Speaker meaning is defined as a speaker's communicative intention about what his or her utterance means in context. However, if we regard speakers’ communicative intentions as individual-level cognitive phenomena, we end up focusing on individuated processes as the basis of speaker meaning that do not account for the achievement of communication. The claim here is that there is, and theoretically must be, a shared, impersonal, basis for forming, implementing, and recognizing speakers’ communicative intentions. This does not subsume speakers’ personal communicative intentions but is intertwined with them to create a duality of speaker meaning. On one hand there is the speaker's personal communicative intention, and on the other, the communicative intention anyone from the speaker's and hearer's community would have in producing that utterance in that context, not just that speaker in particular. What is interesting is when the two sources of communicative intention diverge, the personal and the impersonal, and the generic speaker meaning of an utterance is not one that the speaker stands behind or endorses. This creates a variety of phenomena that only exist because of this divergence. This includes the occurrence and detection of understanding troubles and self-initiated self-repair when the divergence happens by accident, and the social reality of deception, insincerity, sarcasm and joking when the divergence is deliberately produced. Naturally occurring data are examined in which speakers observably attend to the communicative intention of a generic speaker of their utterance with which the utterance credits them.