Reviving pragmatic theory of theory of mind

Frank, Chiyoko Kobayashi

doi:10.3934/neuroscience.2018.2.116

Cited by 17 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Finally, from a neurobiological point of view, a significant overlap has been found between the neural basis of ToM and that of narrative comprehension ( Mar, 2011 ), which is directly related to pragmatic skill ( Botting, 2002 ). All these arguments have led to conclude that “ToM and pragmatic aspects of language are so fused that they cannot be separable” ( Kobayashi, 2018 , p. 118). In this regard, O’Neill (2012) established a pragmatic taxonomy in which “mindful pragmatics” was considered, that is, the uses of language that require adopting the perspective of the listener, such as engaging in a conversation or elaborating a speech.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theory of Mind Profiles in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Adaptive/Social Skills and Pragmatic Competence

et al. 2020

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Theory of Mind (ToM) is one of the most relevant concepts in the field of social cognition, particularly in the case of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Literature showing that individuals with ASD display deficits in ToM is extensive and robust. However, some related issues deserve more research: the heterogeneous profile of ToM abilities in children with ASD and the association between different levels of ToM development and social, pragmatic, and adaptive behaviors in everyday life. The first objective of this study was to identify profiles of children with ASD without intellectual disability (ID), based on explicit and applied ToM knowledge, and compare these profiles with a group of children with typical development (TD). A second objective was to determine differences in symptom severity, adaptive/social behavior, and pragmatic abilities between the profiles identified. Fifty-two children with a clinical diagnosis of ASD without ID and 37 children with TD performed neuropsychological ToM tasks and two vocabulary and memory tests. In addition, all of their mothers completed different questionnaires about applied ToM abilities, severity of ASD symptoms, adaptive/social skills, and pragmatic competence. Two subgroups were identified in the cluster analysis carried out with explicit and applied ToM indicators. The "Lower ToM abilities" profile obtained significantly lower scores than the "Higher ToM abilities" profile on all the ToM measures. Furthermore, the analysis of covariance, controlling for vocabulary and working memory (ANCOVAs), showed statistically significant differences in applied ToM abilities between the two groups of children with ASD without ID and the group with TD. However, only the group with "Higher ToM abilities" achieved similar performance to the TD group on the verbal task of explicit ToM knowledge. Finally, the "Lower ToM abilities" cluster obtained significantly higher scores on autism symptoms (social and communication domains) and lower scores on adaptive behavior and pragmatic skills than the cluster with "Higher ToM abilities." Taken together, these findings have implications for understanding the heterogeneity in ToM skills in children with ASD without ID, and their differential impact on social, communicative, and adaptive behaviors.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theory of Mind Profiles in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Adaptive/Social Skills and Pragmatic Competence

et al. 2020

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“…1. It provides new experimental arguments for a pragmatic explanation of the failure of young children in explicit FBT (Cummings, 2013;Helming et al, 2014Helming et al, , 2016Westra, 2017;Westra and Carruthers, 2017;Frank, 2018). 2.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This will also help the character find the chocolate (interpretation 2). As children gain experience in discourse about the beliefs of others, they begin to be able to recognize the true purpose of the question and their true expectation (interpretation 3): reporting explicitly the false belief of the character called Maxi (Westra and Carruthers, 2017;Frank, 2018). They then understand that the question "Where will Maxi look for the chocolate?"…”

Section: The Ambiguity Of the Tom Questionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pragmatics in the False-Belief Task: Let the Robot Ask the Question!

et al. 2020

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The poor performances of typically developing children younger than 4 in the first-order false-belief task “Maxi and the chocolate” is analyzed from the perspective of conversational pragmatics. An ambiguous question asked by an adult experimenter (perceived as a teacher) can receive different interpretations based on a search for relevance, by which children according to their age attribute different intentions to the questioner, within the limits of their own meta-cognitive knowledge. The adult experimenter tells the child the following story of object-transfer: “Maxi puts his chocolate into the green cupboard before going out to play. In his absence, his mother moves the chocolate from the green cupboard to the blue one.” The child must then predict where Maxi will pick up the chocolate when he returns. To the child, the question from an adult (a knowledgeable person) may seem surprising and can be understood as a question of his own knowledge of the world, rather than on Maxi's mental representations. In our study, without any modification of the initial task, we disambiguate the context of the question by (1) replacing the adult experimenter with a humanoid robot presented as “ignorant” and “slow” but trying to learn and (2) placing the child in the role of a “mentor” (the knowledgeable person). Sixty-two typical children of 3 years-old completed the first-order false belief task “Maxi and the chocolate,” either with a human or with a robot. Results revealed a significantly higher success rate in the robot condition than in the human condition. Thus, young children seem to fail because of the pragmatic difficulty of the first-order task, which causes a difference of interpretation between the young child and the experimenter.

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“…Paralleling the finding that the acquisition of mental words is aided by complement clauses ("thinking or believing that") (Papafragou et al, 2007), mental state attribution is made possible by learning the syntactic structure for embedding propositions into propositions, in a meta-representational format ("Maxi thinks that »the chocolate is in the cupboard«"). Again, others have argued for the role of pragmatics (Harris et al, 2005;Frank, 2018;Rubio-Fernandez, 2021). A meta-analysis found that language indeed exerts a considerable influence on ToM: syntax and semantics, alongside receptive vocabulary size, memory for complements, and general language ability, were all positively associated with it (Milligan et al, 2007).…”

Section: Developmental Psychology's Debate: Language For Tom or Tom F...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Meaning as mentalization

Forgács

2024

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in developmental science as well. The relation between linguistic form and content has been loosened up in recent pragmatic approaches to communication, showing that code-based models of language comprehension must be augmented by context-sensitive, pragmatic-inferential mechanisms to recover the speaker’s intended meaning. Language acquisition has traditionally been thought to involve building a mental lexicon and extracting syntactic rules from noisy linguistic input, while communicative-pragmatic inferences have also been argued to be indispensable. Recent research findings exploring the electrophysiological indicator of semantic processing, the N400, have raised serious questions about the traditional separation between semantic decoding and pragmatic inferential processes. The N400 appears to be sensitive to mentalization—the ability to attribute beliefs to social partners—already from its developmental onset. This finding raises the possibility that mentalization may not simply contribute to pragmatic inferences that enrich linguistic decoding processes but that the semantic system may be functioning in a fundamentally mentalistic manner. The present review first summarizes the key contributions of pragmatic models of communication to language comprehension. Then, it provides an overview of how communicative intentions are interpreted in developmental theories of communication, with a special emphasis on mentalization. Next, it discusses the sensitivity of infants to the information-transmitting potential of language, their ability to pick up its code-like features, and their capacity to track language comprehension of social partners using mentalization. In conclusion, I argue that the recovery of meaning during linguistic communication is not adequately modeled as a process of code-based semantic retrieval complemented by pragmatic inferences. Instead, the semantic system may establish meaning, as intended, during language comprehension and acquisition through mentalistic attribution of content to communicative partners.

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Reviving pragmatic theory of theory of mind

Cited by 17 publications

References 92 publications

Theory of Mind Profiles in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Adaptive/Social Skills and Pragmatic Competence

Theory of Mind Profiles in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Adaptive/Social Skills and Pragmatic Competence

Pragmatics in the False-Belief Task: Let the Robot Ask the Question!

Meaning as mentalization

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