語用論(Pragmatics)を考える

Mini Mental State

Evaluating Model Fit

Relevance Communication And Cognition

Evidence-Based Cognitive Rehabilitation: Systematic Review of the Literature From 2009 Through 2014.

The aim of the study is to investigate the relationship among age, first- and second-order Theory of Mind and the increasing ability of children to understand and produce different kinds of communicative acts – sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts - expressed through linguistic and extralinguistic expressive means. To communicate means to modify an interlocutor's mental states (Grice, 1989), and pragmatics studies the inferential processes that are necessary to fill the gap, which often exists in human communication, between the literal meaning of a speaker’s utterance and what the speaker intends to communicate to the interlocutor. We administered brief video-clip stories showing different kinds of pragmatic phenomena – sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts - and first- and second-order ToM tasks, to 120 children, ranging in age from 3 to 8 years. The results showed the existence of a trend of difficulty in children’s ability to deal with both linguistic and extralinguistic pragmatic tasks, from the simplest to the most difficult: sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative acts. A hierarchical regression analysis indicated that age plays a significant role in explaining children’s performance on each pragmatic task. Furthermore, the hierarchical regression analysis revealed that first-order ToM has a causal role in explaining children’s performance in handling sincere and deceitful speech acts, but not irony. We did not detect any specific role for second-order ToM. Finally, ToM only partially explains the observed increasing trend of difficulty in children’s pragmatic performance: the variance in pragmatic performance explained by ToM increases between sincere and deceitful communicative acts, but not between deceit and irony. The role of inferential ability in explaining the improvement in children’s performance across the pragmatic tasks investigated is discussed.

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Sincere, Deceitful, and Ironic Communicative Acts and the Role of the Theory of Mind in Childhood.

There are several reasons why adolescence is interesting It is in this phase that an individual finds herself fully facing the external world: basically equipped with the kind of social cognition that s/he has acquired at home, at school and through the media during childhood, s/he has now to meet a host of other, diverse views of what "reasonable," "appropriate," or "expected" courses of thought and emotions are, in the wild with friends and peers, romantic or sexual partners, teachers and employers, and the society at large Furthermore, she is also expected, both at home and in the external world, to have a wholly new degree of control over such courses While the idea that the development of social cognition still progresses after infancy (and possibly throughout the life span) is clearly gaining consensus in the field, the literature building on it is still scarce One of the reasons for this probably is that most tests used to study it focus on its basic component, namely theory of mind, and have been mostly devised for us with children; therefore, they are not suitable to deal with the hugely increasing complexity of social and mental life during adolescence and adulthood Starting from a review of the literature available, we will argue that the development of social cognition should be viewed as a largely yet-to-be-understood mix of biological and cultural factors While it is widely agreed upon that the very initial manifestations of social life in the newborn are largely driven by an innate engine with which all humans are equally endowed, it is also evident that each culture, and each individual within it, develops specific adult versions of social cognition

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“No more a child, not yet an adult”: studying social cognition in adolescence

Assessment of pragmatic impairment in right hemisphere damage

Objective To verify the efficacy of Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment (CPT), a new rehabilitation training program for improving communicative-pragmatic abilities. Design The CPT program consists of 24 group sessions, concerned with improving several communication modalities, theory of mind (ToM), and cognitive components that can affect pragmatic performance, such as awareness and executive functions. Participants A sample of 15 adults with severe traumatic brain injury. Main measures Improvements were evaluated before and after training, using the equivalent forms of the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo), a tool for evaluating comprehension and production of a wide range of pragmatic phenomena. A neuropsychological and ToM assessment was also conducted. Results The patients' performance improved after training, in terms of both comprehension and production, in all the communication modalities assessed by the ABaCo, that is, linguistic, extralinguistic, paralinguistic, and social appropriateness abilities. The follow-up showed that the improvement of patients persists after 3 months from the end of the training. Conclusions The results suggest that the CPT program is efficacious in improving communicative-pragmatic abilities in individuals with TBI, and that improvements at this level are still detectable even in chronic patients years after the injury.

Ilaria Gabbatore

Papers

Sincere, Deceitful, and Ironic Communicative Acts and the Role of the Theory of Mind in Childhood.

“No more a child, not yet an adult”: studying social cognition in adolescence

Assessment of pragmatic impairment in right hemisphere damage

Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment: A Rehabilitative Program for Traumatic Brain Injury Individuals.

A broad assessment of theory of mind in adolescence: the complexity of mindreading