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<p>Herzliche Einladung zu einem Vortrag von Prof. G. Gergely (CEU) über</p>
<p>The Pragmatic Sense</p>
<p>Species-unique sensitivity to recognise ostensive communicative signals induces pragmatic inferences and communicative mind-reading in preverbal infants</p>
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<p>am 9. März 2023 um 18 Uhr</p>
<p>Im Hörsaal des Instituts</p>
<p>Sensengasse 3a, 1. OG</p>
<p>1090 Wien</p>
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<p>Abstract</p>
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<p>Humans’ species-unique adaptation for linguistic communication relies on two kinds of evolved mechanisms to ensure efficient information transfer: (i) a system of <em>code-based symbols (spoken words) and syntactic combinatorial devises </em>encoding and decoding the literal meaning of verbal utterances, and (ii) <em>pragmatic Inferential and mind-reading mechanisms</em> inferring the speaker’s intended meaning conveyed by verbal utterances used in the given communicative context. </p>
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<p>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 <em>ostensive communicative actions </em>and the <em>communicative and informative intentions </em>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 <em>purely non-verbal ostensive communicative action manifestations </em>relevant information that the communicating social partner intends to convey. </p>
<p>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 <em>non-verbal behavioural cues</em>(such as eye-contact, or being addressed by motherese) that are interpreted as <em>ostensive communicative acts </em>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. </p>
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<p>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 <em>contingent turn-taking exchange of unfamiliar(non-verbal) vocal signal sequences </em>as an evolved behavioural cue indicating <em>ostensive communication </em>and <em>transmission of new and relevant information </em>between cooperating social epistemic agents. Earlier studies demonstrated that 8- and 10-month-olds recognise an <em>unfamiliar entity’s</em> <em>contingent reactivity at a distance</em> 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 <em>abstract structural constraints on the serial organisation of (unfamiliar) vocal signals</em> 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 <em>algebraic non-local serial dependency structure</em> (satisfying the structural constraint on linguistic signal sequences of natural languages that support syntactic rules of a context-free phrase-structure grammar). </p>
<p>The turn-taking exchange of these <em>partially co-dependent and partially variable signal sequences</em> 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. </p>
<p>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 <em>selectively restricted their attribution of ostensive communication</em> and <em>communicative transfer of new and relevant information</em> to the condition that satisfied the <em>two essential criteria for diagnosing conversational information exchange</em>: </p>
<p>(i)<span> </span>Partial co-dependence and partial variability of the signal sequences exchanged, that are </p>
<p>(ii)<span> </span>Produced by two contingently interacting communicative agents in a temporally contingent turn-taking exchange. </p>
<p>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. </p>
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<p>Institut für Sprachwissenschaft</p>
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