Dear All!

We would like to inform you that the date of György Gergely's talk has been changed. The new date is: 17:00 (CET), Tuesday, 20 February 2024

Location: 1064 Budapest, Izabella 46, 101 room

Speaker: György Gergely (Cognitive Development Center, Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University - Private University Vienna)

Title: The Pragmatic Stance: Infants’ Naïve Theory of Communicative Action

Abstract:

According to the standard view humans’ species-specific adaptation for linguistic communication relies on two kinds of evolved mechanisms for information transfer: 

(i) a system of code-based arbitrary symbols (words) and syntactic combinatorial devises for encoding and decoding the literal meaning of verbal utterances, and 

(ii) pragmatic Inferential and mindreading mechanisms for inferring the speaker’s intended meaning from the verbal utterances used in the given communicative context. 

Recent evolutionary-based cognitive theories of communication (such as relevance theory, Sperber & Wilson, 1986, 2002, and natural pedagogy theory, Gergely & Csibra, 2006, Csibra & Gergely, 2011) proposed that humans’ communicative competence is an early and independent cognitive adaptation selected for recognizing ostensive communicative actions and interpreting the communicative and informative intentions they manifest. On this view, even before and independently of acquiring linguistic skillsthe ‘pragmatic stance’ enables an ostensively addressed human agent to recover from purely non-verbal ostensive communicative action manifestations the relevant information that the communicating partner intends to convey in the given communicative context. 

In my talk I’ll focus on our recent studies exploring the hypothesis that young preverbal infants’ can recognize contingent turn-taking exchange of unfamiliar signal sequences as an informative cue indicating ostensive communicative transfer of new and relevant information between cooperating epistemic agents. 

First, I’ll summarize evidence from natural pedagogy theory demonstrating preverbal infants’ evolved sensitivity to certain behavioral signals (such as eye-contact, or motherese) that are interpreted as ostensive communicative acts and induce assumptions of referential intention, presumption of relevance, and special interpretive biases in the infants about the intended informative contents conveyed by non-verbal ostensive manifestations. Similarly, 8- and 10-month-olds recognize an unfamiliar entity’s contingent reactivity at a distance as an ostensive cue indicating a communicative agent acting with communicative and referential intentions. When the contingently reactive agent performed a subsequent object-directed orientating action infants reacted with a referential gaze following response to identify the intended referent indicated. Following up on these findings our new studies were designed to test the further hypothesis that young infants may also possess evolved sensitivity to abstract structural constraints on the serial organization of signals that the turn-taking exchange of signal sequences must satisfy to sanction infants’ interpretation that they serve (and indicate) communicative transmission of new and relevant information between the ostensively communicating 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 characterized the exchanged signal sequences. The ‘communicative information transfer’ condition was designed to present infants with repeated turn-taking exchanges of sequences of (non-speech) vocal signals characterized by an algebraic non-local serial dependency structure (satisfying the structural constraint on linguistic signal sequences of natural languages that support syntactic rules of a context-free phrase-structure grammar). 

The turn-taking exchange of these partially co-dependent and partially variable signal sequences was contrasted with two control conditions characterized either by exchanging (i) perfectly contingent repetitions of identical signal sequences or by exchanging (ii) fully unrelated random 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 constraints characterizing the partially co-dependent and partially variable signal sequences was left intact while the condition of turn-taking exchange between two distally interacting agents was violated as only a single agent produced the very same series of vocal signals. 

These studies employed a violation-of-expectation looking time paradigm with 10- and 13-month-old infants to test our predictions about infants’ context-based pragmatic inferences and communicative mindreading abilities. In sum, the results provide converging evidence showing that the (as yet largely preverbal) infants could recognize the abstract structural cue of partial variability of signal sequences exchanged by two turn-taking agents. They selectively restricted their attribution of ostensive communication and communicative transfer of relevant information to the condition that satisfied both of the two essential criteria for diagnosing conversational information exchange: 

(i) Partial co-dependence and partial variability of the signal sequences that are exchanged by 

(ii) Two distally interacting turn-taking agents in a temporally contingent manner

I’ll end by briefly discussing the multiple implications of these findings for 

a) preverbal infants pragmatic inferential and communicative mindreading abilities, and (b) preverbal infants’ preparedness to identify and extract the abstract serial structural properties of signal sequences that satisfy the structural constraints that characterize the syntactic properties of natural languages, which is likely to play an essential role both in the acquisition of word meanings and the syntactic structure of natural languages.   

If you have questions about the event, please contact us via email (kelemen.alexandra@ppk.elte.hu or reka.schvajda@ppk.elte.hu).

We look forward to seeing you at the event,

Alexandra Kelemen

Réka Schvajda

organizers

ELTE Department of Cognitive Psychology