Ira Noveck

Like many languages, European French has a contrapositive response option (Si) to reject the negative content of a question and to express accord with the questioner’s implicit affirmative. Consider the question “Barack does not eat meat?” (in French) where the response Si indicates that he does. In-spired by Gricean analyses, we view Si as an expression that includes a pragmatic component. Based on extant studies that typically show that a pragmatic inference is cognitively costly, we predicted that the articulation of Si ought to appear costly compared to felicitous Oui and Non answers. We created an original task that enjoins a participant to remove a box’s cover (while searching for a candy) before hearing a puppet’s question. In the critical Negative-Si (NS) condition, the participant finds the candy in, say, a white box (when two boxes are under consideration) and the interlocutor-puppet’s negative question is It is not in the white box? Besides rates of accurate responses, our main dependent variable was Response Reaction Times (RRT’s), viz. the time to naturally voice an answer (Si in this case). Controls were the Affirmative-Oui (AO), Affirmative-Non (AN), and Negative-Non (NN) condi-tions. Importantly, the puppet began each trial with one of three kinds of prior belief, a) by declaring that the candy is surely in, or; b) surely not in, the to-be-presented box or; c) by saying “I don’t know where it is.” These were included to determine whether answerers consider the questioner’s prior ep-istemic state when responding. Experiment 1 compared 6-year-olds to adults and found that i) profi-cient uses of Si are costly with respect to the other three conditions and that; ii) answers in the wake of a “I don’t know where it is” prompt slowdowns when compared to the other two declarations. Both findings are consistent with our pre-registered predictions. Four-year-olds, investigated in Experiment 2, pattern almost identically with the 6-year-olds, with one major exception. Their fastest response oc-curs when answering Si, leading to a unique developmental effect. Our account for this finding is that four-year-olds rely on a minimally semantic representation of Si, which encodes disagreement be-tween the negative content of the question and the facts. We propose that there are pragmatic process-es intrinsic to Si – which ultimately signals agreement with the questioner’s implicit affirmative -- and that mastering these requires greater maturity.

This review of Mercier and Sperber's The Enigma of Reason presents some recent (and at times personal) history of the Reasoning literature in order to underline how innovative their Argumentative Theory is and to provide the backdrop to three comments.  The first comment addresses their deflationary view of deductive inference-making -- which presents deductive abilities as so run-of-the-mill that they are not differentiable from other lower-order intuitions. I take issue with this characterization and describe five strands of positive research showing that fundamental deductive inference-making affords regularities in behavior that sets it apart from other kinds of inference-making discussed in the context of Reasoning.  The second comment is concerned with experimentally related issues, such as the sort of predictions that follow from Argumentative Theory and that would make it falsifiable (specifically, which reasoning problems would benefit from deliberation?).  The third comment addresses the notion of explanations.  Reasoning labs have long been reticent to incorporate participants' explanations into their accounts for philosophical, empirical and historical reasons.  Researchers would benefit if the Argumentative Theory were to better clarify what sort of explanations are beneficial for experimental purposes.

Relational reasoning (A. B, B. C, therefore A. C) shares a number of similarities with numerical cognition, including a common behavioural signature, the symbolic distance effect. Just as reaction times for evaluating relational conclusions decrease as the distance between two ordered objects increases, people need less time to compare two numbers when they are distant (e.g., 2 and 8) than

Children's art was studied as a function of (1) gender of child, (2) picture condition (drawings of same-sex versus mixed-sex dyads), and (3) child-rearing setting (US town [N = 89] versus Israeli town [N = 132] versus Israeli kibbutz [N = 88]). Pictures were scored for theme or ...

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1. Reviews inference-difficulty claims and findings from the mental-model approach to understanding propositional reasoning. This is followed by a discussion concerning how claims from mental models differ from those of mental logic and how one can practically test between them. Finally, we report a study in which we directly compare predictions from 2 theories in 1 overarching procedure. 124 undergraduate students were presented problem sets which concerned either People-in-cities or Letters said to be written on an index card. ...

This work examines how people interpret the sentential connective "or", which can be viewed either inclusively (A or B or both) or exclusively (A or B but not both). Following up on prior work concerning quantifiers (Bott & Noveck, 2004; Noveck, 2001; Noveck & Posada, 2003), which shows that the common pragmatic interpretation of "some", some but not all, is conveyed as part of an effortful step, we investigate how extra effort applied to disjunctive statements leads to a pragmatic interpretation of "or", or but not both. Experiment 1 compelled participants to wait for three seconds before answering, hence giving them the opportunity to process the utterance more deeply. Experiments 2 and 3 emphasized "or", either by visual means ("OR") or by prosodic means (contrastive stress) as another way to encourage participants to apply more effort. Following a relevance-theoretic line of argument, we hypothesized that conditions encouraging more processing effort would give rise to more pragmatic inferences and hence to more exclusive interpretations of the disjunction. This prediction was confirmed in the three experiments.

Logical connectives (e.g., or, if, and not) are central to everyday conversation, and the inferences they generate are made with little effort in pragmatically sound situations. In contrast, the neural substrates of logical inference-making have been studied exclusively in abstract tasks where pragmatic concerns are minimal. Here, we used fMRI in an innovative design that employed narratives to investigate the interaction between logical reasoning and pragmatic processing in natural discourse. Each narrative contained three premises followed by a statement. In Fully-deductive stories, the statement confirmed a conclusion that followed from two steps of disjunction-elimination (e.g., Xavier considers Thursday, Friday, or Saturday for inviting his girlfriend out; he removes Thursday before he rejects Saturday and declares "I will invite her out for Friday"). In Implicated-premise stories, an otherwise identical narrative included three premises that twice removed a single option from consideration (i.e., Xavier rejects Thursday for two different reasons). The conclusion therefore necessarily prompts an implication (i.e., Xavier must have removed Saturday from consideration as well). We report two main findings. First, conclusions of Implicated-premise stories are associated with more activity than conclusions of Fully-deductive stories in a bilateral frontoparietal system, suggesting that these regions play a role in inferring an implicated premise. Second, brain connectivity between these regions increases with pragmatic abilities when reading conclusions in Implicated-premise stories. These findings suggest that pragmatic processing interacts with logical inference-making when understanding arguments in narrative discourse.

While some studies indicate that ironic -- as opposed to literal -- readings of utterances take longer to process, others indicate that the two are processed at comparable speeds. We propose that mindreading processes are at least partly responsible for the mixed results as we present three experiments that include stories having a target utterance with either an Ironic or Literal reading. Experiment 1 replicates earlier findings (Spotorno et al., 2012) showing that ironic readings take longer than literal ones when fillers include decoys, stories that call for an ironic remark but present a banal utterance instead and thus diffuse participants’ expectations for irony. Starting with Experiment 2, decoys are removed leading to effects that are arguably revealing of Theory-of-Mind processes. One is an Early-Late effect, which occurs when ironic utterances are read as readily as literal ones in the second half of an experimental session, creating “mixed” results in the laboratory. In Experiment 3, we further added antecedents before a critical event so that, later, the target utterance would be echoing an explicitly stated thought and facilitate irony comprehension (Sperber & Wilson, 1981; Gibbs, 1986). Results reveal an Early-Late effect here, too. Further evidence of Theory of Mind activity follows from analyses of participants’ social skill subscale scores in the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001). Socially-inclined participants are more likely than the socially-disinclined to use a story’s negative-event to portend the arrival of an irony; in contrast, socially-disinclined participants appear more reactive than the socially inclined to explicit antecedents.

The combined knowledge of word meanings and grammatical rules does not allow a listener to grasp the intended meaning of a speaker’s utterance. Pragmatic inferences on the part of the listener are also required. The present work focuses on the processing of ironic utterances (imagine a slow day being described as ‘‘really productive’’) because these clearly require the listener to go beyond the linguistic code. Such utterances are advantageous experimentally because they can serve as their own controls in the form of literal sentences (now imagine an active day being described as ‘‘really productive’’) as we employ techniques from electrophysiology (EEG). Importantly, the results confirm previous ERP findings showing that irony processing elicits an enhancement of the P600 component (Regel et al., 2011). More original are the findings drawn from Time Frequency Analysis (TFA) and especially the increase of power in the gamma band in the 280–400 time-window, which points to an integration among different streams of information relatively early in the comprehension of an irony. This represents a departure from traditional accounts of language processing which generally view pragmatic inferences as late-arriving. We propose that these results indicate that unification operations between the linguistic code and contextual information play a critical role throughout the course of irony processing and earlier than previously thought.

An utterance such as “Show me the large rabbit” potentially generates a Contrastive Inference, i.e. the article the and the adjective large allow listeners to pragmatically infer the existence of other entities having the same noun (e.g. a small rabbit). The primary way to measure children’s ability to carry out this pragmatic inference has been through tasks that measure infelicity detection. We argue that such studies are not as revealing as one might assume because they force children to adopt metalinguistic stances and they consider infelicity detection as tantamount to contrastive inference making. To address these concerns, we develop a game-like situation in which all utterances remain felicitous. Moreover, we make a distinction between responses that are revealing of a pragmatic interpretation and responses that are revealing of a reliance on the utterance’s linguistically encoded meaning (i.e., a lack of contrastive inference). Three experiments with 7-year-olds, 10-year-olds and adults show that pragmatic interpretations do not emerge among 7-year-olds, that 10-year-olds do not show adult-like performance, and that adults are not at ceiling. We conclude that contrastive inference-making is an effortful process and that the ability to detect such gains-in-information through language increases with age.

It is now well established that communicators interpret others’ mental states through what has been called “Theory of Mind” (ToM). From a linguistic-pragmatics perspective, this mentalizing ability is considered critical because it is assumed that the linguistic code in all utterances underdetermines the speaker’s meaning, leaving a vital role for ToM to fill the gap. From a neuroscience perspective, understanding others’ intentions has been shown to activate a neural ToM network that includes the right and left temporal parietal junction (rTPJ, lTPJ), the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and the precuneus (PC). Surprisingly, however, there are no studies – to our knowledge – that aim to uncover a direct, on-line link between language processing and ToM through neuroimaging. This is why we focus on verbal irony, an obviously pragmatic phenomenon that compels a listener to detect the speaker’s (dissociated, mocking) attitude (Wilson, 2009). In the present fMRI investigation, we compare participants’ comprehension of 18 target sentences as contexts make them either ironic or literal. Consider an opera singer who tells her interlocutor: “Tonight we gave a superb performance!” when the performance in question was clearly awful (making the statement ironic) or very good (making the statement literal). We demonstrate that the ToM network becomes active while a participant is understanding verbal irony. Moreover, we demonstrate - - through Psychophysiological Interactions (PPI) analyses -- that ToM activity is directly linked with language comprehension processes. The paradigm, its predictions, and the reported results contrast dramatically with those from seven prior fMRI studies on irony.

This squib reconsiders Geis & Zwicky’s influential proposal on Invited Inference, according to which conditionals are regularly “perfected” to biconditionals. We first show that the “regularity” assumption attached to conditional perfection is doubtful in light of established experimental findings concerning other logical terms, such as Some and or and the conjunction and. We then review existing conditional data with the aim of making them cohere with these other experimental findings. We argue that (a) the process that leaves the impression of a biconditional reading (the acceptance of a fallacious argument such as the Affirmation of the Consequent) arises only after all participants detect a violation on-line from what is essentially a surprising minor premise and that; (b) some participants make an effort to adjust to such unexpected violations at a relatively small cognitive cost in order to accept invalid arguments while others persist in rejecting whatever follows and at a greater cognitive cost. Both of these features of conditional processing undermine claims from Geis & Zwicky’s proposal.

It is more difficult for reasoners to detect that the letter–number pair H7 verifies the conditional rule If there is not a T then there is not a 4 than to detect that it verifies the rule If there is an H then there is a 7. In prior work [Prado, J., & Noveck, IA (2007). Overcoming perceptual features in logical reasoning: a parametric functional magnetic resonance imaging study.

Matching bias refers to the non-normative performance that occurs when elements mentioned in a rule do not correspond with those in a test item (eg, consider the double mismatch between the rule If there is a not a T on the card then there is not a 4 and a card showing H6). One aim of the present work is to capture matching bias via reaction times as participants carry out truth-table evaluation tasks.

Abstract: Lest the conjunction “intelligence and reasoning” seduce the reader into supposing that the two are of a piece, we point out that analyses made at the superset level concerning intelligence do not readily align with or outperform the scientific advances made via investigations of reasoning, which at best can be viewed as a subset of intelligent behaviour.

However, once one considers how the sequence of components conveys at least a temporal order the two statements prompt two very different sets of implications. Whereas it would be considered a normal occurrence to hear about someone getting married before getting pregnant (1a); in some parts of the world, it would be considered scandalous to get pregnant before getting married (1b).

Deductive reasoning is traditionally viewed as a unitary process involving either rule-based or visuo-spatial mechanisms. However, there is a disagreement in the neuroimaging literature on whether the data support one alternative over the other. Here we test the hypothesis that discrepancies in the literature result from the reasoning materials themselves.

This volume contains five chapters that discuss experimential evidence relating to implicatures. The kind of implicatures relevant here are conversational implicatures. According to H. Paul Grice, who introduced this notion in 'Logic and conversation'(1967 [1989]), such implicatures originate from the literal meaning of expressions and the fact that speakers follow certain rules in uttering them.

“Although a few pioneers in psycholinguistics had, for more than twenty years, approached various pragmatic issues experimentally, it is only in the past few years that investigators have begun employing the experimental method in testing pragmatic hypotheses (see Noveck & Sperber 2004). We see this emergence of a proper experimental pragmatics as an important advance with a great potential for further development.

Imaginez que vous essayez d'assembler un puzzle. Comment allez-vous vous y prendre? Vous pourriez d'abord commencer par les coins qui servent de points d'ancrage—ils sont aisément reconnaissables et il n'y en a que quatre. Vous pourriez ensuite repérer les couleurs les plus saillantes ou d'autres caractéristiques remarquables partagées par plusieurs pièces. Enfin, le plus difficile sera d'examiner les pièces intermédiaires afin de décider comment et où elles pourraient être placées.

Il est généralement tentant de présenter le raisonnement comme un partenaire de la logique: après tout, les réponses correctes dans les tâches de raisonnement sont fondées sur des normes logiques et les erreurs sont des indications d'un raisonnement incorrect. Cette perspective est indispensable dans la mesure où la logique constitue l'arrière plan pour l'évaluation des résultats du raisonnement.

In a very broad sense, pragmatics is the study of language use. It encompasses loosely related research programmes ranging from formal studies of deictic expressions to sociological studies of ethnic verbal stereotypes. In a more focused sense, pragmatics is the study of how linguistic properties and contextual factors interact in the interpretation of utterances. We will be using “pragmatics” only in this narrower sense.