Rasmus Overmark, Derek Ball and Amanda Seed
Affiliation: University of St Andrews
Category: Psychology
Keywords: Mentalizing, Pragmatics, Linguistic relativity, Cognitive development, Theory of mind, Mindreading, Quotative 'be like'
Date: Thursday 4th of September
Time: 17:30
Location: Room 161 (161)
View the full session: Pragmatics
Discussions of linguistic relativity in cognition have mostly focused on semantic labels or grammars (Lupyan & Bergen, 2016; Reines & Prinz, 2009; Wolff & Holmes, 2011). Recently, Rubio-Fernandez (2021, 2024) has proposed that linguistic relativity may also arise from pragmatics – our capacity to draw on contextual features to infer speaker meanings. This effect is proposed to arise specifically in mentalizing. Rubio-Fernandez proposes that some linguistic devices, such as demonstratives and articles, may require speakers and addressees to attend to their interlocutor’s attention and knowledge for their successful use. This means that the pragmatics of such devices train the attention of their users, with possible developmental consequences. Expanding on Rubio-Fernandez’ analysis, we propose that pragmatic relativity may arise through the novel quotative ‘be like’ (QBL), which can be used to quote utterances and thoughts using ‘like’, as in: I was like, ‘that’s crazy!’ While QBL has emerged quite recently it has rapidly become the preferred way of talking about mental states and utterances (now more popular than ‘says’ and ‘thinks’) among English speakers under 40 (Barbieri, 2009; D’Arcy, 2012). It is also widely present and popular in other languages (Coppen & Foolen, 2012; Golato, 2000; Kambon & Duah, 2017). Crucially, QBL does not itself signal whether a thought or an utterance is quoted (Blyth et al., 1990; Stokke & Ball, Forthcoming). This means that we may need to monitor an interlocutor’s mental states for reliable production and interpretation. Our study asks two questions. First, to what extent do communicators rely on contextual information about mental states to interpret QBL? Second, what are QBL’s implications for pragmatic relativity in mentalizing development? To answer the first question, we present new empirical work on how adults and children decode QBL. We developed a novel interpretation task that presented 99 adult English speakers with 18 short stories containing QBL. Subjects indicated whether they thought the occurrence of QBL was said or thought. We performed a within-subject manipulation of contextual cues, using three levels of cueing. The first two cues are designed to capture two types of information that are critical to mentalizing, goals and norms (Andrews, 2008; Dennett, 1989; Gergely, 2011; Gergely & Csibra, 2003; Tomasello, 2020). Goal cues involved a character goal that favoured either a 'said' or 'thought' interpretation, so that e.g. a character might not successfully pursue their goal were they to say the quoted content out loud. Norm stories involved a social norm which one interpretation would violate, so that e.g. a story character would transgress a norm of politeness where they to merely think the quoted content. No-cue stories used neither goals nor norms to favour an interpretation. We calculated agreement scores, as a measure of the degree to which our participants agreed on the interpretation of QBL. Median agreement scores ranged from high for strongly-cued: 1; and weakly-cued: 0.83; to low in the absence of a cue: 0.67 (1 indicates perfect agreement, 0.5 indicates a perfect split in interpretations). A GLMM analysis showed the effect of both cues on agreement to be highly significant. An LMM analysis of participant reaction times also indicated that participants were slower to interpret QBL in the no-cue condition than in both the goal cue and the norm cue conditions. This indicates that people rely on mentalistic information about goals and norms to interpret QBL. To answer the second question, we also present preliminary results from our ongoing data collection on children’s interpretation of QBL in a sample of 6–8-year-olds. We use an adapted task that utilizes a storybook paradigm where participants match pictures to short stories to give their interpretations of QBL. This experiment also includes the hidden emotion task (Peterson et al., 2012; Wellman et al., 2011; Wellman & Liu, 2004) allowing us to test for a correlation between interpretation of QBL and mentalizing. The hidden emotion task is particularly well suited for this comparison, because hidden emotion understanding requires participants to distinguish between private thoughts and overt behaviors—an ability that is also crucial for successful QBL interpretation Our findings suggest that we rely on monitoring contextual information about the speaker’s goals and their adherence with social norms. We propose that this reliance on context might contribute to a form of pragmatic relativity that affects children’s understanding of hidden emotions. Both successful interpretation of QBL and hidden emotion understanding depends on attention to the distinction between private thoughts and overt behaviours. We therefore hypothesize that QBL experience may train sensitivity to the distinction, contributing to an understanding of hidden emotions. This would expand the scope of the pragmatic relativity thesis: pragmatic relativity may extend to a wider range of mentalizing skills, including those that emerge later in development and require more advanced conceptual abilities than those previously explored by Rubio-Fernandez. Since QBL is language-specific, it also serves as a valuable test case for cross-cultural pragmatic relativity. While our present work falls short of establishing a direct causal link between QBL interpretation and understanding of hidden emotions this is a promising direction for future research.