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In sentences such as “Some dogs are mammals,” the literal semantic meaning (“Some and possibly all dogs are mammals”) conflicts with the pragmatic meaning (“Not all dogs are mammals,” known as a scalar implicature). Prior work has shown that adults vary widely in the extent to which they adopt the semantic or pragmatic meaning of such utterances, yet the underlying reason for this variation is unknown. Drawing on theoretical models of scalar implicature derivation, we explore the hypothesis that the cognitive abilities of executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM) contribute to this observed variation. In Experiment 1, we show that individuals with better ToM are more likely to compute a scalar implicature and adopt the pragmatic meaning of an utterance; however, EF makes no unique contribution to scalar implicature comprehension after accounting for ToM. In Experiment 2, we replicate this finding and assess whether it generalizes to the comprehension of other pragmatic phenomena such as indirect requests (e.g., “It's hot in here” uttered to ask for something to be done) and metaphor (e.g., “to harvest courage”). This is the first evidence that differences in ToM are associated with pragmatic competence in neurotypical adults across distinct pragmatic phenomena.

Code-switching is prevalent in bilingual speech, and follows specific syntactic constraints. Several theories have been proposed to explain these constraints, and in this paper we focus on the Minimalist Program and the Matrix Language Frame model. Using a determiner-noun picture naming paradigm, we tested the ability of these theories to explain determiner-noun code-switches in Spanish–English bilinguals. The Minimalist Program predicts that speakers will use the determiner from the gendered language, whereas the Matrix Language Frame model predicts that the determiner will come from the language that dominates the syntactic structure in a code-switched utterance. We observed that the bilinguals had slowest naming times and decreased accuracy in Spanish determiner - English noun conditions (‘el dog’), and that adding a Matrix Language did not modulate this pattern. Although our results do not align with either theory, we conclude that they can be explained by the WEAVER++ model of speech production.

During communication, hearers try to infer the speaker's intentions to be able to understand what the speaker means. Nevertheless, whether (and how early) preschoolers track their interlocutors' mental states is still a matter of debate. Furthermore, there is disagreement about how children's ability to consult a speaker's belief in communicative contexts relates to their ability to track someone's belief in non-communicative contexts. Here, we study young children's ability to successfully acquire a word from a speaker with a false belief; we also assess the same children's success on a traditional false belief attribution task. We show that the ability to consult the epistemic state of a speaker during word learning develops between the ages of three and five. We also show that false belief understanding in word-learning contexts proceeds similarly to standard belief-attribution contexts when the tasks are equated. Our data offer evidence for the development of mind-reading abilities during language acquisition.