[PLing] Vortrag György Gergely am 09. März 2023 "The Pragmatic Sense"

Thu Feb 23 14:52:33 CET 2023

Herzliche Einladung zu einem Vortrag von Prof. G. Gergely (CEU) über

The Pragmatic Sense

Species-unique sensitivity to recognise ostensive communicative signals 
induces pragmatic inferences and communicative mind-reading in preverbal 
infants

am 9. März 2023 um 18 Uhr

Im Hörsaal des Instituts

Sensengasse 3a, 1. OG

1090 Wien

Abstract

Humans' species-unique adaptation for linguistic communication relies on 
two kinds of evolved mechanisms to ensure efficient information 
transfer: (i) a system of _code-based symbols (spoken words) and 
syntactic combinatorial devises _encoding and decoding the literal 
meaning of verbal utterances, and (ii) _pragmatic Inferential and 
mind-reading mechanisms_ inferring the speaker's intended meaning 
conveyed by verbal utterances used in the given communicative context.

Recent cognitive and evolutionary-based pragmatic models of 
communication such as relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986, 2002) 
and natural pedagogy theory Csibra & Gergely, 2011, Gergely & Csibra, 
2006) proposed that the pragmatic inferential component of humans' 
communicative competence is an early and independent cognitive 
adaptation selected for the recognition and interpretation of _ostensive 
communicative actions _and the _communicative and informative intentions 
_they manifest. On this view, even before and independently of acquiring 
linguistic skills the pragmatic system can provide sufficient means for 
an ostensively addressed agent to recover from _purely non-verbal 
ostensive communicative action manifestations _relevant information that 
the communicating social partner intends to convey.

In my talk I'll first summarise relevant research findings produced by 
generated by natural pedagogy theory that provide empirical support for 
the above hypothesis. These studies demonstrate preverbal infants' 
evolved sensitivity to certain _non-verbal behavioural cues_(such as 
eye-contact, or being addressed by motherese) that are interpreted as 
_ostensive communicative acts _and induce assumptions of referential 
intention, presumption of relevance, and special interpretive biases 
(such as reference to kinds) in the infants about the intended 
informative contents of non-verbal ostensive manifestations.

The rest of my talk will focus on novel results of recent studies by 
Tibor Tauzin and myself (Tauzin & Gergely, 2018, 2019, 2021) exploring 
preverbal infants' hypothesised sensitivity to _contingent turn-taking 
exchange of unfamiliar(non-verbal) vocal signal sequences _as an evolved 
behavioural cue indicating _ostensive communication _and _transmission 
of new and relevant information _between cooperating social epistemic 
agents. Earlier studies demonstrated that 8- and 10-month-olds recognise 
an _unfamiliar entity's_ _contingent reactivity at a distance_ as an 
ostensive cue inducing attribution of intentional agency and referential 
intention that is indicated by infants' subsequent referential gaze 
following of the agent's object-directed orientating response.  Our 
recent studies were designed to test whether young infants also 
demonstrate evolved sensitivity to detect and recognise the _abstract 
structural constraints on the serial organisation of (unfamiliar) vocal 
signals_ that a turn-taking exchange of signal sequences need to satisfy 
to sanction the attribution of communicative transfer of new and 
relevant information between social epistemic agents. We presented 
infants with two unfamiliar entities engaged in a repeated turn-taking 
exchange of unfamiliar (non-speech) sound sequences (triplets of melodic 
sounds or morse beeps) in three conditions to compare infants' reactions 
to three types of serial dependency structure that characterised the 
exchanged signal sequences. The 'communicative information transfer' 
condition was designed to present infants with repeated turn-taking 
exchanges of sequences of vocal signals characterised by an _algebraic 
non-local serial dependency structure_ (satisfying the  structural 
constraint on linguistic signal sequences of natural languages that 
support syntactic rules of a context-free phrase-structure grammar).

The turn-taking exchange of these _partially co-dependent and partially 
variable signal sequences_ was contrasted with two control conditions 
characterised by exchanging (i) perfectly contingent repetitions of 
identical signal sequences or (ii) fully random unrelated series of 
vocal signals (neither of which could support communicative transmission 
of novel information). Our third control study compared the 
'communicative information transfer' condition with a single agent 
condition in which the structural constraint of the partially variable 
and partially variable signal sequences were left intact while the 
turn-taking exchange between two agents condition was violated as only a 
single agent produced the vocal signal sequences.

These studies employed a violation-of-expectation looking time paradigm 
testing our hypotheses on 10- and 13-month-old infants using two 
dependent measures. In sum, the results provide strong evidence that the 
infants of both age groups could detect and recognise the abstract 
structural cue that characterised the serial organisation of partially 
co-dependent and partially variable signal sequences exchanged by two 
turn-taking agents and _selectively restricted their attribution of 
ostensive communication_ and _communicative transfer of new and relevant 
information_ to the condition that satisfied the _two essential criteria 
for diagnosing conversational information exchange_:

(i)      Partial co-dependence and partial variability of the signal 
sequences exchanged, that are

(ii)       Produced by two contingently interacting communicative agents 
in a temporally contingent turn-taking exchange.

In my talk I'll discuss the multiple implications of these findings for 
a) preverbal infants pragmatic inferential and communicative 
mind-reading abilities that enable them to infer the relevant 
informative content manifested by non-verbal forms of ostensive 
communicative exchanges, and for (b) preverbal infants preparedness to 
identify and extract communicatively used linguistic structural 
constraints that is likely to play an essential role both in the 
acquisition of word meanings and the syntactic structure of the natural 
language acquired.

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Institut für Sprachwissenschaft
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