Papers by Simona Di Paola
Intercultural Pragmatics, May 11, 2022
Little is known about presuppositional skills in preschool years. Developmental research has most... more Little is known about presuppositional skills in preschool years. Developmental research has mostly focused on children's understanding of too and evidence is mixed: some studies show that the comprehension of too is not adult-like at least until school age, while more recent findings suggest that even pre-schoolers can interpret too-sentences in more age-appropriate tasks. Importantly, no study has tested directly, within the same experiment, pre-schoolers' presupposition understanding in satisfaction versus accommodation, nor with respect to other trigger types. Yet, it is well known that adults' processing of a presupposition is costlier when accommodation is required and that the type of trigger influences the processing demands. Therefore, both the trigger type and the contextual availability of a presupposition might influence young children's comprehension. We tested this with a story completion task that assessed 3-5-year-olds' comprehension of presuppositions activated by either regret or too in contexts that either satisfied the presupposition or required accommodation. Results reveal that pre-schoolers overall exhibit an understanding of presupposition. Crucially, this starkly improves between the age of 3 and 5 and the developmental trajectory depends on both context and trigger type: understanding the presupposition of regret seems easier than that of too for younger children, and less difficulties emerge when the context satisfies the presupposition. Thus, the development of presupposition comprehension in pre-schoolers depends both on the type of trigger and the contextual availability of the presuppositionsatisfied versus requiring failure repair.
Cognitive Processing, Apr 20, 2022
The present study investigates the processing of presuppositions across the life span and extends... more The present study investigates the processing of presuppositions across the life span and extends the findings of the only available study on presupposition processing and typical aging by Domaneschi and Di Paola (J Pragmat 140:70-87, 2019). In an online and offline task, we investigate the impact of cognitive load during the processing and recovery of two presupposition triggers-definite descriptions and change-of-state verbs-comparing a group of younger adults with a group of older adults. The collected experimental data show that (1) presupposition recovery declines during normal aging, (2) presupposition recovery of change-of-state verbs is more cognitively demanding for older adults than the recovery of definite descriptions, and lastly (3) presupposition recovery for the change-of-state verb begin is more demanding than the change-of-state verb stop. As of today, few works have directly investigated presupposition processing across the life span. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work revealing that cognitive load directly impacts the recovery of presuppositions across the life span, which in turn suggests an involvement of verbal working memory.
Intercultural Pragmatics
Little is known about presuppositional skills in pre-school years. Developmental research has mos... more Little is known about presuppositional skills in pre-school years. Developmental research has mostly focused on children’s understanding of too and evidence is mixed: some studies show that the comprehension of too is not adult-like at least until school age, while more recent findings suggest that even pre-schoolers can interpret too-sentences in more age-appropriate tasks. Importantly, no study has tested directly, within the same experiment, pre-schoolers’ presupposition understanding in satisfaction versus accommodation, nor with respect to other trigger types. Yet, it is well known that adults’ processing of a presupposition is costlier when accommodation is required and that the type of trigger influences the processing demands. Therefore, both the trigger type and the contextual availability of a presupposition might influence young children’s comprehension. We tested this with a story completion task that assessed 3–5-year-olds’ comprehension of presuppositions activated by ...
To know or not to know. Psycholinguistic evidences on three kinds of knowledge attributions
COVID-19: influence of war-metaphors and socio-political factors
Multiple Factors in the Development of Metaphor Comprehension
XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference, 2018
Cognitive Processing, 2021
Few works have addressed the processing of indirect requests in High-Functioning Autism (HFA), an... more Few works have addressed the processing of indirect requests in High-Functioning Autism (HFA), and results are conflicting. Some studies report HFA individuals’ difficulties in indirect requests comprehension; others suggest that it might be preserved in HFA. Furthermore, the role of Theory of Mind in understanding indirect requests is an open issue. The goal of this work is twofold: first, assessing whether comprehension of indirect requests for information is preserved in HFA; second, exploring whether mind-reading skills predict this ability. We tested a group of (n = 14; 9–12 years) HFA children and two groups of younger (n = 19; 5–6 years) and older (n = 28; 9–12 years) typically developing (TD) children in a semi-structured task involving direct, indirect and highly indirect requests for information. Results suggested that HFA can understand indirect and highly indirect requests, as well as TD children. Yet, while Theory of Mind skills seem to enhance older TD children underst...
Data from the time-windows
PLOS ONE, 2021
In recent times, many alarm bells have begun to sound: the metaphorical presentation of the COVID... more In recent times, many alarm bells have begun to sound: the metaphorical presentation of the COVID-19 emergency as a war might be dangerous, because it could affect the way people conceptualize the pandemic and react to it, leading citizens to endorse authoritarianism and limitations to civil liberties. The idea that conceptual metaphors actually influence reasoning has been corroborated by Thibodeau and Boroditsky, who showed that, when crime is metaphorically presented as a beast, readers become more enforcement-oriented than when crime is metaphorically framed as a virus. Recently, Steen, Reijnierse and Burgers replied that this metaphorical framing effect does not seem to occur and suggested that the question should be rephrased about the conditions under which metaphors do or do not influence reasoning. In this paper, we investigate whether presenting the COVID-19 pandemic as a war affects people’s reasoning about the pandemic. Data collected suggest that the metaphorical framin...
Acta Analytica, 2018
Since Gettier's (1963) seminal work, epistemologists have broadly questioned the validity of the ... more Since Gettier's (1963) seminal work, epistemologists have broadly questioned the validity of the tripartite analyses, arguing that entertaining a justified true belief is sometimes neither sufficient nor necessary for attributing knowledge to a cognitive subject.
Journal of psycholinguistic research, Jan 16, 2017
The present study investigates the processing of presupposition accommodation. In particular, it ... more The present study investigates the processing of presupposition accommodation. In particular, it concerns the processing costs and the time-course of accommodation as compared to presupposition satisfaction. Data collected in a self-paced word-by-word reading times experiment support three results. First, independently on the presupposition trigger in use, accommodation is costlier than satisfaction. Second, presupposition accommodation takes places immediately just as the trigger becomes available and proceeds incrementally during the sentence processing. Third, accommodated information is harder to be recalled. The results offer evidence for the on-line processing of presuppositions and, consistently with the traditional semantic framework, support the idea that, presuppositions are semantic properties encoded in the lexical meaning of the presupposition triggers.
Cognition, 2017
This methodological principle presumes that semantic intuitions be uniformly shared among speaker... more This methodological principle presumes that semantic intuitions be uniformly shared among speakers and across actual and possible cases. Machery et al. (2004), Machery, Olivola, and de Blanc (2009) questioned the truth of this presumption. First, they noted that philosophers have exclusively relied on their own intuitions, i.e., theoreticians' intuitions. Second, by means of an empir
Multiple Factors in the Development of Metaphor Comprehension
Cognitive Processing
The present study investigates the processing of presuppositions across the life span and extends... more The present study investigates the processing of presuppositions across the life span and extends the findings of the only available study on presupposition processing and typical aging by Domaneschi and Di Paola (J Pragmat 140:70–87, 2019). In an online and offline task, we investigate the impact of cognitive load during the processing and recovery of two presupposition triggers—definite descriptions and change-of-state verbs—comparing a group of younger adults with a group of older adults. The collected experimental data show that (1) presupposition recovery declines during normal aging, (2) presupposition recovery of change-of-state verbs is more cognitively demanding for older adults than the recovery of definite descriptions, and lastly (3) presupposition recovery for the change-of-state verbbeginis more demanding than the change-of-state verbstop. As of today, few works have directly investigated presupposition processing across the life span. To the best of our knowledge, thi...
Pragmatic abilities in early Parkinson’s disease
Brain and Cognition, 2021
Language impairment in Parkinson's disease (PD) has been investigated at different levels of ... more Language impairment in Parkinson's disease (PD) has been investigated at different levels of linguistic skills. Only a few studies dealt with pragmatic abilities in PD, and these suggest an impairment of pragmatic skills, which might affect quality of life. However, previous studies enrolled patients with heterogeneous symptom severity. The goal of this study is twofold: first, to investigate whether pragmatic skills are compromised at the early stage of PD; second, to explore whether an early pragmatic impairment is explained by a decay of a specific cognitive function. We assessed pragmatic abilities (discourse production, comprehension of narratives, humour, and figurative language), and a cluster of cognitive functions (memory, verbal fluency, inhibition, shifting, and ToM) in a sample of early PD patients and a group of age-matched healthy controls. Early PD patients showed impaired general pragmatic skills (the ability to perform different pragmatic tasks in language produ...
Introduction: Humor refers to anything that tends to make others laugh and is a universal aspect ... more Introduction: Humor refers to anything that tends to make others laugh and is a universal aspect of human experience and communication [1]. Traditional theories of humor processing [2] posit that humor comprehension is a two-stage process in which the perception of an incongruity in a playful context is followed by its resolution. When the resolution is successful, one "gets" the joke and the typical feeling of mirth. Recent research in the Relevance Theory framework underlines how resolution is achieved through different types of inferential-pragmatic-processes filling the gap between what is coded and what is eventually interpreted [3]. As a useful technique to investigate the temporal sequence of cognitive mechanisms, Event-Related brain Potentials (ERP) generally found support for two-stage accounts of humor comprehension. However, the results are far from being consistent. Late positive effects (P600/LPC) have been discussed in many studies [4,5,6,7,8,9,10], sometimes linked to inferential processes [7,8,10]. These positivities were often accompanied by negative effects, interpreted as N400 effects [4,7,8,9,10], even though their scalp distribution was not canonical [7,8,9]. In addition, several studies reported sustained negative effects over frontal left electrodes, suggesting the involvement of the Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) [4,5,6]: because of these temporal and topographic differences, no agreement exists on the functional meaning of these effects. These discrepancies may be due to the inter-individual variability in the ERP response to humor. Researchers often dig into such variability by splitting participants into groups based on performance [4,9], sex [5] or verbal abilities [5]. However, these studies might have failed to characterize differences that could be due to more general cognitive or socio-cognitive abilities, which likely play a role in incongruity detection and resolution. Here we investigated the effect of verbal working memory and social skills on the ERP, using a relatively large sample of participants. We selected these abilities as predictors of the ERP response based on behavioral and neuroimaging studies [1,12]. Method: 70 jokes taken from Italian repertoires were included as materials. Each joke consisted of a three-sentence context (presented sentence by sentence) followed by a final punchline (presented word by word), including a humorous trigger word in a non-final position. For each joke, a non-humorous, straightforward-ending counterpart was created by replacing the humorous trigger word with a different word matched for frequency, length, and grammatical class, as in the following example: A man goes to the grocery store to buy apples. / The grocer asks: "Would you like the red ones or the green ones?"/ And the man says: / "It doesn't really matter, 'cause I peel them anyway" (humor)-"It doesn't really matter, 'cause I pay them the same price" (non-humor). Materials were rated for funniness on 7-point Likert scale [humor=3.97; non-humor=2.07] and cloze probability [humor=30.63%; non-humor=9.64%]. 52 right-handed participants (31F; 24y on average) took part in the study. We collected measures of verbal working memory through a sentence-span task and of social skills through the Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ). Single trial ERPs were analyzed with linear mixed models, focusing on 3 regions of interest (Frontal Left, Centro-Parietal and Parietal) and 3 time-windows (early-300-500ms; middle-500-700ms; late-700-1000ms).
The pragmatics of :-) and :-( When and how much we use emoticons on WhatsApp
In the present experiment, the processing costs and timecourse of presupposition accommodation we... more In the present experiment, the processing costs and timecourse of presupposition accommodation were studied, as compared to presupposition satisfaction and independently of the presupposition trigger in use. Two main results emerged from the data collected. First, presupposition accommodation requires greater processing costs than satisfaction, reflecting a process of context repair where both a linking and an updating process are needed. Second, presupposition accommodation takes places immediately just as the trigger becomes available and proceeds incrementally during the sentence processing. This result suggests that presuppositions are processed on-line and that, independently of the type of trigger in use, they are accommodated before the asserted content is computed.
Cognitive Processing, 2021
Few works have addressed the processing of indirect requests in High-Functioning Autism (HFA), an... more Few works have addressed the processing of indirect requests in High-Functioning Autism (HFA), and results are conflicting. Some studies report HFA individuals' difficulties in indirect requests comprehension; others suggest that it might be preserved in HFA. Furthermore, the role of Theory of Mind in understanding indirect requests is an open issue. The goal of this work is twofold: first, assessing whether comprehension of indirect requests for information is preserved in HFA; second, exploring whether mind-reading skills predict this ability. We tested a group of (n = 14; 9-12 years) HFA children and two groups of younger (n = 19; 5-6 years) and older (n = 28; 9-12 years) typically developing (TD) children in a semi-structured task involving direct, indirect and highly indirect requests for information. Results suggested that HFA can understand indirect and highly indirect requests, as well as TD children. Yet, while Theory of Mind skills seem to enhance older TD children und...
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Papers by Simona Di Paola