N400 differences between physical and mental metaphors: The role of Theories of Mind

Canal, Paolo; Bischetti, Luca; Bertini, Chiara; Ricci, Irene; Lecce, Serena; Bambini, Valentina

doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2022.105879

Cited by 26 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 94 publications

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“…The RME has often been used as a measure of individual differences in mindreading skills for neurotypical populations (e.g., Domes et al, 2007; Kidd & Castano, 2013; Mar et al, 2006), but in recent years the task's validity and interpretation have been criticized (e.g., Baker et al, 2014; Black, 2019; Oakley et al, 2016). Oakley et al (2016) noted that RME performance might be driven by the ability to identify emotional states rather than the ability to attribute mental states to others (for a related interpretation of the task see Canal et al, 2022). These two abilities, however, very often co-occur in ASD individuals, who are the ones that typically score lowest on the RME task.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When irony is faster than its literal control: The role of mindreading during irony comprehension.

Ronderos¹,

Tomlinson²,

Noveck³

2024

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Irony is a heavily context-dependent pragmatic phenomenon. But what is it about context that facilitates or blocks irony comprehension? Based on the echoic account, we suggest that a context facilitates irony comprehension when it makes manifest a speaker's intentions and attitude, i.e., when a context makes it easy for participants to engage their mindreading abilities. In two pre-registered self-paced reading experiments, we investigated the comprehension of sentences in English that could be understood as ironic or literal, according to the story frame that participants read leading to the target sentence. In Experiment 1, we found that when the story frames prevent participants from anticipating the speaker's intention, literal readings of critical sentences are-not surprisingly-faster than ironic ones. Importantly, when the story frames gave access to the speaker's intentions, we find cases in which ironic readings are actually faster than literal ones, resulting in a novel finding for the irony comprehension literature. Further, when the speaker was described as having a sincere attitude towards their utterance, participants tended to understand the utterances literally. They tended to understand them ironically when it was not clear what the speaker's attitude was. In Experiment 2 we investigated whether the findings of Experiment 1 could be linked to individual differences in participants' mindreading abilities. We found that participants who scored higher on a standard Theory of Mind task (the "Reading the mind in the Eyes" task) were significantly more likely to derive ironic-but not literal-interpretations. We see these results as supporting the echoic account of irony comprehension. This work discusses the relevance of our findings to the long-standing debate on the processing effort of ironic versus literal sentences.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When irony is faster than its literal control: The role of mindreading during irony comprehension.

Ronderos¹,

Tomlinson²,

Noveck³

2024

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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“…It is possible to find a reflection of these results in the most recent publications in pragmatics between 2021 and 2022 if we examine the most recent publications in pragmatics between these two years. Research in recent years has focused on L2 pragmatic comprehension [ 132 ], speech acts in virtual reality [ 133 ], pragmatic disorder in schizophrenia [ 134 ], request production by EFL learners [ 135 ], and role of theory of mind in physical and mental metaphors [ 136 ]. Although these five studies share the idea that they use pragmatics in their research, they approach it from different perspectives.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although these five studies share the idea that they use pragmatics in their research, they approach it from different perspectives. For instance, we can see discussing pragmatic in relation to L2 and EFL learners in [ 135 , 137 ] (i.e., cultural pragmatics), pragmatics and mental health [ 134 ] (i.e., clinical pragmatics), and processing of pragmatics elements [ 136 ] (i.e., psychpragmatics).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pragmatics: Mapping Evidence on Enhancing Children’s Use of Linguistic and Non-Linguistic Capacities for Interactive Communication

et al. 2022

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New-born infants communicate from the first minute they come to life. This non-linguistic and non-verbal capacity to interact from the first day they come to life enables them to express their needs and evidence their typical development. This capacity to interact develops to include linguistic and non-linguistic use of verbal and non-verbal interaction, that is, pragmatics. Because pragmatics is heterogeneously structured of semiotic, cognitive, motor and sensory elements so it is vital to ensure successful human interaction. The other language elements (i.e., phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic) are essential inputs for this human interaction outcome (i.e., pragmatics). Accordingly, this study sought to map evidence that pragmatics can enhance children’s use of linguistic and non-linguistic capacities for interactive communication. This was addressed by conducting bibliometric and scientometric analyses of 6554 documents from Scopus, 1167 from WOS and 11,230 from Lens between 1939 and 2022. We analysed the past, present and future developments of the field of pragmatics using bibliometric and scientometric indicators. The scientometric analysis was conducted using CiteSpace 5.8.R3 and VOSviewer 1.6.18 software, which enabled the tabulation, visualisation and measurement of the impact of central influencers in the field of pragmatics. In the light of our results, pragmatics continues to expand in order to understand human interaction in a deeper way and to enhance children’s typical interactions with the environment around them. The group should also include adults or elderly people whose pragmatic language skills have been impaired due to any acquired or developmental disorder, such as a brain injury.

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“…These approaches are not ideal and could lead to incidental findings. The time window selection from anywhere from 0 to 1 second post word onset would be another issue, though recent datadriven methods might help reduce cherry picking time windows (Canal et al, 2022).…”

Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative affect increases reanalysis of conflicts between discourse context and world knowledge

2022

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IntroductionMood is a constant in our daily life and can permeate all levels of cognition. We examined whether and how mood influences the processing of discourse content that is relatively neutral and not loaded with emotion. During discourse processing, readers have to constantly strike a balance between what they know in long term memory and what the current discourse is about. Our general hypothesis is that mood states would affect this balance. We hypothesized that readers in a positive mood would rely more on default world knowledge, whereas readers in a negative mood would be more inclined to analyze the details in the current discourse.MethodsParticipants were put in a positive and a negative mood via film clips, one week apart. In each session, after mood manipulation, they were presented with sentences in discourse materials. We created sentences such as “With the lights on you can see...” that end with critical words (CWs) “more” or “less”, where general knowledge supports “more”, not “less”. We then embedded each of these sentences in a wider discourse that does/does not support the CWs (a story about driving in the night vs. stargazing). EEG was recorded throughout.ResultsThe results showed that first, mood manipulation was successful in that there was a significant mood difference between sessions. Second, mood did not modulate the N400 effects. Participants in both moods detected outright semantic violations and allowed world knowledge to be overridden by discourse context. Third, mood modulated the LPC (Late Positive Component) effects, distributed in the frontal region. In negative moods, the LPC was sensitive to one-level violation. That is, CWs that were supported by only world knowledge, only discourse, and neither, elicited larger frontal LPCs, in comparison to the condition where CWs were supported by both world knowledge and discourse.DiscussionThese results suggest that mood does not influence all processes involved in discourse processing. Specifically, mood does not influence lexical-semantic retrieval (N400), but it does influence elaborative processes for sensemaking (P600) during discourse processing. These results advance our understanding of the impact and time course of mood on discourse.

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N400 differences between physical and mental metaphors: The role of Theories of Mind

Cited by 26 publications

References 94 publications

When irony is faster than its literal control: The role of mindreading during irony comprehension.

When irony is faster than its literal control: The role of mindreading during irony comprehension.

Pragmatics: Mapping Evidence on Enhancing Children’s Use of Linguistic and Non-Linguistic Capacities for Interactive Communication

Negative affect increases reanalysis of conflicts between discourse context and world knowledge

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