Leena Mäkinen, Katja Dindar, Ilaria Gabbatore, Aija Kotila, Maria Frick, Hanna Ebeling, Soile Loukusa
Difficulties in false belief reasoning are associated with autism spectrum. False belief tasks tend to be easy to administer and code, and thus are often used for testing purposes. However, the amount of information that can be gleaned from this type of assessment task goes beyond correct/wrong score attribution. Instead, fine-grained information may be derive from a detailed qualitative analysis of the content of the answers, as well as the strategies used to produce them. Moreover, the testing situation contains other interesting aspects, such as a child’s orientation to the task. Therefore, we examined both qualitatively and quantitatively the various ways children (15 autistic and 15 control children; mean age 7;5 years) responded to a false belief question. The false belief question was more difficult for the autistic than for the control children, but there was no statistically significant difference among the answering strategies between the groups. The answering strategies were mostly similar between the groups. Autistic children preferred to use nouns or locative pro-adverbs while answering, whereas control children used more versatile ways of answering, even though the length of the answers did not differ between the groups. When considering the orientation to the ongoing task, the autistic children had longer reaction times than the control children did. Some autistic children needed the researcher’s support to focus on the task, but in general, expressions of uncertainty or commenting during the task were not frequent among the children. The results of this study can be utilized in deepening our understanding of the abilities of autistic individuals and to develop sensitive ways to assess and support autistic children.
{"title":"Autistic children and control children use similar strategies when answering false belief questions","authors":"Leena Mäkinen, Katja Dindar, Ilaria Gabbatore, Aija Kotila, Maria Frick, Hanna Ebeling, Soile Loukusa","doi":"10.1515/ip-2024-0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2024-0003","url":null,"abstract":"Difficulties in false belief reasoning are associated with autism spectrum. False belief tasks tend to be easy to administer and code, and thus are often used for testing purposes. However, the amount of information that can be gleaned from this type of assessment task goes beyond correct/wrong score attribution. Instead, fine-grained information may be derive from a detailed qualitative analysis of the content of the answers, as well as the strategies used to produce them. Moreover, the testing situation contains other interesting aspects, such as a child’s orientation to the task. Therefore, we examined both qualitatively and quantitatively the various ways children (15 autistic and 15 control children; mean age 7;5 years) responded to a false belief question. The false belief question was more difficult for the autistic than for the control children, but there was no statistically significant difference among the answering strategies between the groups. The answering strategies were mostly similar between the groups. Autistic children preferred to use nouns or locative pro-adverbs while answering, whereas control children used more versatile ways of answering, even though the length of the answers did not differ between the groups. When considering the orientation to the ongoing task, the autistic children had longer reaction times than the control children did. Some autistic children needed the researcher’s support to focus on the task, but in general, expressions of uncertainty or commenting during the task were not frequent among the children. The results of this study can be utilized in deepening our understanding of the abilities of autistic individuals and to develop sensitive ways to assess and support autistic children.","PeriodicalId":13669,"journal":{"name":"Intercultural Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139949384","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Business email has a significant impact on commercial activities and organizational image. Intercultural pragmatics is the new development of pragmatics, moving its focus from mono-cultural communication to multi-cultural communication, aiming to describe how communicators seek, activate, and create common ground to complete tasks in intercultural communication contexts. Drawing on 1,477 separate English emails exchanged between a Chinese auto parts export company and its business partners in different parts of the world, we find, from the intercultural pragmatics perspective, that different types of interpersonal strategies, i.e., alliance building, other-caring, and self-enhancing/defending, are employed to construct virtual intimacy and to create and highlight interpersonal relationship dimensions in international business communication. These strategies are intended to facilitate the accomplishment of communication tasks by creating emergent common ground, reflecting the dynamics and interculturality of business communication. This research deepens our understanding of the mechanism of relationship management in international business communication.
{"title":"Interpersonal strategies in international business emails: The intercultural pragmatics perspective","authors":"Ping Liu, Huiying Liu","doi":"10.1515/ip-2023-5004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2023-5004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Business email has a significant impact on commercial activities and organizational image. Intercultural pragmatics is the new development of pragmatics, moving its focus from mono-cultural communication to multi-cultural communication, aiming to describe how communicators seek, activate, and create common ground to complete tasks in intercultural communication contexts. Drawing on 1,477 separate English emails exchanged between a Chinese auto parts export company and its business partners in different parts of the world, we find, from the intercultural pragmatics perspective, that different types of interpersonal strategies, i.e., alliance building, other-caring, and self-enhancing/defending, are employed to construct virtual intimacy and to create and highlight interpersonal relationship dimensions in international business communication. These strategies are intended to facilitate the accomplishment of communication tasks by creating emergent common ground, reflecting the dynamics and interculturality of business communication. This research deepens our understanding of the mechanism of relationship management in international business communication.","PeriodicalId":13669,"journal":{"name":"Intercultural Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135514693","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In face-to-face conversations, interlocutors might recognize the ironic intent of a speaker relying on the incongruity of the comment relative to a situation, and on irony markers such as the ironic tone of voice and specific facial expressions. In instant messaging, acoustical and visual cues are typically absent, and the context is not always shared. We investigated the role of emoji as cues to detect irony, hypothesizing that they might play the role of the conversational context. We administered to 156 Italian adults a questionnaire, presenting them with WhatsApp messages followed by an emoji, which was congruent or incongruent with the (non-)evaluative positive or negative comment, and found that evaluative incongruent items were rated as more ironic, and that incongruent positive messages were more easily recognized as ironic (criticisms) compared to incongruent negative messages (ironic compliments), in line with the asymmetry of affect hypothesis.
{"title":"“Irony is easy to understand ”: The role of emoji in irony detection","authors":"Giulia Bettelli, Francesca Panzeri","doi":"10.1515/ip-2023-5001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2023-5001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In face-to-face conversations, interlocutors might recognize the ironic intent of a speaker relying on the incongruity of the comment relative to a situation, and on irony markers such as the ironic tone of voice and specific facial expressions. In instant messaging, acoustical and visual cues are typically absent, and the context is not always shared. We investigated the role of emoji as cues to detect irony, hypothesizing that they might play the role of the conversational context. We administered to 156 Italian adults a questionnaire, presenting them with WhatsApp messages followed by an emoji, which was congruent or incongruent with the (non-)evaluative positive or negative comment, and found that evaluative incongruent items were rated as more ironic, and that incongruent positive messages were more easily recognized as ironic (criticisms) compared to incongruent negative messages (ironic compliments), in line with the asymmetry of affect hypothesis.","PeriodicalId":13669,"journal":{"name":"Intercultural Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135514689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract In this study, we explore how language affordances are exploited in intercultural communication using the socio-cognitive approach. Based on previous discussions of language affordances, we divide the exploiting practices into three categories, namely, enabling a language affordance, constraining a language affordance, and presenting multiple language affordances. Data were collected from 16 roundtable discussions that took place over four seasons of a Chinese TV program. Each roundtable discussion involved four L1 Chinese speakers and eleven L2 Chinese speakers. The L2 speakers are multilingual, frequently speaking more than one language, including English. A quantitative analysis of the data reveals a collective pattern in the participants’ exploitation of language affordances, that is, they tend to activate more core common-ground knowledge than the knowledge of emergent common ground. In addition, they are inclined to construct multicultural common ground, which they actively align themselves with. Their awareness of communicative goals and self-identification as competent multilingual speakers also influence their choice of language affordances.
{"title":"Exploiting language affordances in Chinese-mediated intercultural communication","authors":"Xi Chen, Weihua Zhu","doi":"10.1515/ip-2023-5002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2023-5002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this study, we explore how language affordances are exploited in intercultural communication using the socio-cognitive approach. Based on previous discussions of language affordances, we divide the exploiting practices into three categories, namely, enabling a language affordance, constraining a language affordance, and presenting multiple language affordances. Data were collected from 16 roundtable discussions that took place over four seasons of a Chinese TV program. Each roundtable discussion involved four L1 Chinese speakers and eleven L2 Chinese speakers. The L2 speakers are multilingual, frequently speaking more than one language, including English. A quantitative analysis of the data reveals a collective pattern in the participants’ exploitation of language affordances, that is, they tend to activate more core common-ground knowledge than the knowledge of emergent common ground. In addition, they are inclined to construct multicultural common ground, which they actively align themselves with. Their awareness of communicative goals and self-identification as competent multilingual speakers also influence their choice of language affordances.","PeriodicalId":13669,"journal":{"name":"Intercultural Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135514692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This study explores the Hebrew ′ATA LO MEVIN (‘you don’t understand’) construction in a corpus of casual conversation. Employing the methodology of Interactional Linguistics and Multimodal Conversation Analysis, we show that deployment of this construction is fixed and formulaic and only rarely denotes the recipient’s lack of understanding. Based on a mostly synchronic analysis, we suggest a grammaticization path followed by this construction from a negative epistemic subject-predicate construction denoting literal lack of understanding to a discourse marker signaling the opening of a new narrative, while seeking recipient alignment with the speaker’s intensified affective stance. The path described reveals that embodied conduct, as well as prosodic, morphophonological, and syntactic features of the construction correlate with the weakening of its literal meaning. This sheds light on the uses speakers make of the construction, on how heightened engagement may be achieved in discourse, and on the dialogic nature of interaction and grammar.
摘要:本研究探讨了希伯来语“ATA LO MEVIN”(“你不明白”)在日常会话语料库中的结构。采用互动语言学和多模态会话分析的方法，我们发现这种结构的部署是固定的和公式化的，并且很少表示接受者缺乏理解。基于大部分共时性分析，我们提出了一条语法化路径，即从表示字面上缺乏理解的否定认知主谓结构到标志着开启新叙事的话语标记，同时寻求接受者与说话者强化的情感立场保持一致。所描述的路径揭示了具体的行为，以及结构的韵律、音素和句法特征与其字面意义的弱化有关。这揭示了说话者对结构的使用，在话语中如何提高参与度，以及互动和语法的对话性质。
{"title":"From lack of understanding to heightened engagement: A multimodal study of Hebrew <i>′ATA LO MEVIN</i> ‘You don’t understand’","authors":"Hilla Polak-Yitzhaki, Yael Maschler","doi":"10.1515/ip-2023-5003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2023-5003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This study explores the Hebrew ′ATA LO MEVIN (‘you don’t understand’) construction in a corpus of casual conversation. Employing the methodology of Interactional Linguistics and Multimodal Conversation Analysis, we show that deployment of this construction is fixed and formulaic and only rarely denotes the recipient’s lack of understanding. Based on a mostly synchronic analysis, we suggest a grammaticization path followed by this construction from a negative epistemic subject-predicate construction denoting literal lack of understanding to a discourse marker signaling the opening of a new narrative, while seeking recipient alignment with the speaker’s intensified affective stance. The path described reveals that embodied conduct, as well as prosodic, morphophonological, and syntactic features of the construction correlate with the weakening of its literal meaning. This sheds light on the uses speakers make of the construction, on how heightened engagement may be achieved in discourse, and on the dialogic nature of interaction and grammar.","PeriodicalId":13669,"journal":{"name":"Intercultural Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135514688","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Naoko Taguchi: <i>The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pragmatics</i>","authors":"Shaopeng Li","doi":"10.1515/ip-2023-5005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2023-5005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":13669,"journal":{"name":"Intercultural Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135509731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This study proposes a local grammar approach to intercultural speech act studies, which is demonstrated by an investigation into apologies in Hong Kong, Singaporean, Indian, and British Englishes. Drawing on data taken from the respective components of the International Corpus of English, the investigation revealed a mixed picture of the ways in which apologies were performed by speakers of the Englishes under examination, which may be ascribed to the differences existing in cultural norms of the target language and those of one’s own and, consequently, a strategic compromise between speakers’ efforts to conform to the cultural norms of the target language and efforts to retain their own. This leads to a further argument that apologies in the three selected Asian Englishes might have undergone a mixed process of language indigenisation and pragmatic nativisation. Methodologically, the study shows that local grammars can reliably quantify speech act realizations across contexts or corpora, thereby offering a useful methodology to facilitate intercultural, and other kinds of contrastive, speech act studies.
{"title":"Local grammars and intercultural speech act studies: A study of apologies in four English varieties","authors":"Hang Su, Xiaofei Lu","doi":"10.1515/ip-2023-4002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2023-4002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This study proposes a local grammar approach to intercultural speech act studies, which is demonstrated by an investigation into apologies in Hong Kong, Singaporean, Indian, and British Englishes. Drawing on data taken from the respective components of the International Corpus of English, the investigation revealed a mixed picture of the ways in which apologies were performed by speakers of the Englishes under examination, which may be ascribed to the differences existing in cultural norms of the target language and those of one’s own and, consequently, a strategic compromise between speakers’ efforts to conform to the cultural norms of the target language and efforts to retain their own. This leads to a further argument that apologies in the three selected Asian Englishes might have undergone a mixed process of language indigenisation and pragmatic nativisation. Methodologically, the study shows that local grammars can reliably quantify speech act realizations across contexts or corpora, thereby offering a useful methodology to facilitate intercultural, and other kinds of contrastive, speech act studies.","PeriodicalId":13669,"journal":{"name":"Intercultural Pragmatics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2023-08-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43485201","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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