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Anticipating the learning consequences of actions is crucial to plan efficient information-seeking. Such a capacity is needed for learners to determine which actions are most likely to result in learning. Here, we tested the early ontogeny of the human capacity to anticipate the amount of learning gained from seeing. In Study 1, we tested infants’ capacity to anticipate the availability of sight. Fourteen-month-old infants (N = 72) were invited to search for a toy hidden inside a container. The participants were faster to attempt at opening a shutter when this action allowed them to see inside the container. Moreover, this effect was specifically observed when seeing inside the container was potentially useful to the participants’ goals. Thus, infants anticipated the availability of sight, and they calibrated their information-seeking behaviors accordingly. In Studies 2-3, we tested toddlers’ capacity to anticipate whether data would be cognitively useful for their goals. Two-and-a-half-year-olds (N = 72) had to locate a target character hidden among distractors. The participants flipped the characters more often, and were comparatively faster to initiate this action when it yielded access to visual data allowing them to locate the target. Thus, toddlers planned their information-seeking behaviors by anticipating the cognitive utility of sight. In contrast, toddlers did not calibrate their behaviors to the cognitive usefulness of auditory data. These results suggest that cognitive models of learning guide toddlers’ search for information. The early developmental onset of the capacity to anticipate future learning gains is crucial for active learning.

International audience; This paper investigates the cognitive mechanisms supporting humans’ interpretation of requests for information. Learners can only search for a piece of information if they know that they are ignorant about it. Thus, in principle, the interpretation of requests for information could be guided by representations of Socratic ignorance (tracking what people know that they do not know). Alternatively, the interpretation of requests for information could be simplified by relying primarily on simple knowledge tracking (i.e., merely tracking what people know). We judged these hypotheses by testing two-and-a-half-year-old toddlers (N = 18), five- to seven-year-old children (N = 72), and adults (N = 384). In our experiments, a speaker asked a question that could be disambiguated by tracking her state of knowledge. We manipulated the speakers’ visuals to modulate the complexity of the ignorance representation required to disambiguate their questions. Toddlers showed no tendency to appeal to representations of Socratic ignorance when disambiguating questions (Pilot S1). Five- to seven-year-olds exhibited a similar pattern of results, and they performed better when information requests could be disambiguated using simple knowledge tracking (Studies 1a-1b). Adults used representations of Socratic ignorance to interpret questions, but were more confident when simple knowledge tracking was sufficient to disambiguate information requests (Studies 2-3). Moreover, adults disambiguated questions as if speakers could request information about things that they were ignorant of, even when speakers had no reason to know about their ignorance (Studies 3-4). Thus, the interpretation of requests for information rests primarily on simple knowledge tracking—and not on representations of Socratic ignorance—a heuristic that reduces processing costs.

International audience; This article reports the results of an experimental study that examines the influence of bilingualism on the acquisition and use of the Maximize Presupposition principle in the context of speakers' choices among propositional attitude predicates (equivalent to) know and think. We compared the performance of monolingual Slovenian-and Italian-speaking school children to that of age-matched early bilingual children speaking both languages. Our findings suggest that while all children demonstrate adherence to Maximize Presupposition in an adult-like manner, bilingualism may enhance performance in pragmatic tasks that bear on this principle, and therefore constitutes a potential advantage in the relevant area.

The question of whether media outlets should anonymize the identity of terrorist attacks perpetrators has becoming prominent in the last four years. The Nice truck attack in 2016 in France has motivated some analysts to encourage vehemently the media to hide the identities of the terrorists. The alleged posthumous glorification is the core argument behind their opinion. Ultimately, major French mainstream media outlets answered to the appeal and decided to anonymize the identity of the terrorists by not broadcasting their pictures. This decision has inspired major media platforms in Europe and in North America to apply the same restriction. However, in the absence of a clearly argued psychological and sociological analysis, such strategy may backfire and even worsen the situation. The paper tries to address the issue with arguments ranging from anthropology to social neuroscience to highlight the potential danger of hiding terrorists’ identity from the public.

International audience; Both syntax and Executive Functions (EF) are involved in Theory-of-Mind (ToM) but their contributory roles have mainly been studied separately. Moreover, researchers have mostly administered False Belief (FB) tasks while they may not be representative of all ToM abilities. Studies of adults give valuable information regarding whether syntax and EF are useful for ToM reasoning (i.e., Reasoning account), however, only the study of children brings direct evidence in favor of ToM emergence (i.e., Emergence account). Also, because the ToM tasks used often entail verbal and executive demands, the links observed could mostly result from such confounds (i.e., Expression account). We evaluated ToM, syntactic and EF abilities in 126 children (3-11 y.o.) using a set of ToM tasks with minimal verbal and executive demands. Our goals were to assess (1) the hierarchical contribution of syntax and EF to ToM, (2) whether results previously obtained for FB tasks are representative of ToM in general, (3) whether the ToM-syntax and ToM-EF links are constant (i.e., Reasoning account) or decrease during development (i.e., Emergence accounts). Results of stepwise regression analyses showed a predominant role of syntax over EF to predict ToM abilities. The comparison of results for ToM and FB tasks showed that FB is not always representativeof ToM. Finally, there was no moderating effect of age on the syntax-ToM or EF-ToM relations, thus suggestive of the Reasoning account rather than the Emergence account.

The experimental literature on the pragmatic abilities of bilinguals is rather sparse. The only study investigating adult second language (L2) learners (Slabakova, 2010) found an increase of pragmatic responses in that population relative to monolinguals. The results of studies on early bilingual children are unclear, some finding a significant increase in pragmatic responses in early bilingual children (preschoolers) relative to monolinguals (Siegal et al., 2007), while another (Antoniou and Katsos, 2017), testing school children, does not. We tested adult French L2 learners of English and Spanish (in their two languages) as well as French monolingual controls in Experiment 1 and Italian-Slovenian early bilingual children (in both languages) and Slovenian monolingual controls in Experiment 2. Our results were similar to those of Antoniou and Katsos (2017) in early bilingual children, but different from those of Siegal et al. (2007). We found no pragmatic bias in adult L2 leaners relative to adult monolinguals.

This study investigated whether early bilingualism and early musical training positively influence the ability to discriminate between prosodic patterns corresponding to different syntactic structures in otherwise phonetically identical sentences in an unknown language. In a same-different discrimination task, participants (N = 108) divided into four groups (monolingual non-musicians, monolingual musicians, bilingual non-musicians, and bilingual musicians) listened to pairs of short sentences in a language unknown to them (French). In discriminating phonetically identical but prosodically different sentences, musicians, bilinguals, and bilingual musicians outperformed the controls. However, there was no interaction between bilingualism and musical training to suggest an additive effect. These results underscore the significant role of both types of experience in enhancing the listeners' sensitivity to prosodic information.

Background According to the linguistic determinism approach, knowledge of sentential complements such as: John says that the earth is flat plays a crucial role in theory of mind (ToM) development by providing a means to represent explicitly people's mental attitudes and beliefs. This approach predicts that mastery of complements determines successful belief reasoning across explicit ToM tasks, even low-verbal ones, and across populations. Aims (1) To investigate the link between a low-verbal ToM-task and complements in Specific Language Impairment (SLI), (2) To determine whether this population shows similar ToM performance to that of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) or those with Typical Development (TD) once these groups are matched on competency for complements, (3) To explore whether complements conveying a falsehood without jeopardizing the veracity of the entire sentence, such as complements of verbs of communication, are more crucial for belief attribution than complements which do not have this property, namely complements of verbs of perception, (?John sees that the earth is flat). Methods & Procedures Children with SLI (n = 20), with ASD (n = 34) and TD (n = 30) completed sentence–picture-matching tasks assessing complementation with communication and perception verbs, as well as a picture-sequencing task assessing ToM. Children were furthermore evaluated for general grammatical and lexical abilities and non-verbal IQ. Outcomes & Results Results reveal that competency on complements relates to ToM performance with a low-verbal task in SLI, and that SLI, ASD and TD groups of equivalent performance on complements also perform similarly for ToM. Results further suggest that complements with an independent truth-value are the only ones to show a significant relation to ToM performance after teasing out the impact of non-verbal reasoning. Conclusions & Implications This study suggests that clinical groups of different aetiologies as well as TD children perform comparably for ToM once they have similar complementation skills. Findings further highlight that specific types of complements, namely those with an independent truth value, relate in a special way to mentalizing. Future work should determine whether these specific structures could be effective in ToM remediation programmes.

This chapter discusses the existence of linguistic norms (defined as socially determined and commonly shared criteria for correctness of action specific to language). It considers linguistic structure and semantic compositionality, lexical semantics, speech acts, and implicit communication and concludes that there are no linguistic norms stricto sensu at any of these levels. However, social norms constraining communication in the intimate societies in which language evolved have left traces in contemporary languages, notably in the universal existence of implicit communication. Key words: linguistic norm, linguistic structure, semantic compositionality, lexical semantics, speech act, implicit communication, Grice, principle of cooperation, society of intimates, evolution of language.

In 1975, Grice introduced the notion of implicature, arguing that it was more appropriate to account for a class of apparent lexical ambiguities through pragmatic processes than by multiplying lexical meanings (Modified Ockham's razor: Do not multiply meanings beyond necessity; Grice, 1975). For the past 20 years, experimental approaches have superseded purely theoretical ones, with mixed results. Paradigms using verification tasks on infelicitous sentences, with rate of pragmatic answers and reaction time as measures, have generally concluded in favor of the post-Gricean views (Bott and Noveck, 2004; Noveck and Reboul, 2008). However, some recent studies discuss additional factors affecting implicature processing and have introduced new paradigms which suggest a different conclusion (Katsos and Bishop, 2011; Breheny et al., 2013; Degen and Tanenhaus, 2015; Foppolo and Marelli, 2017; Bill et al.; Jasbi et al.; Sikos et al.). In addition, current research has shown that lexical scales may play a role in the process in keeping with neo-Gricean views. This Frontiers topic is a collection of 12 contributions in experimental pragmatics focusing on different aspects of child and adult processing of implicatures, factors affecting their rate, relevance of testing paradigms, scale diversity, cross-linguistic differences, and variation in triggers.

One of the most studied scales in the literature on scalar implicatures is the quantifier scale. While the truth of some is entailed by the truth of all, some is felicitous only when all is false. This opens the possibility that some would be felicitous if, e.g., almost all of the objects in the restriction of the quantifier have the property ascribed by the nuclear scope. This prediction from the standard theory of quantifier interpretation clashes with native speakers’ intuitions. In Experiment 1 we report a questionnaire study on the perception of quantifier meanings in English, French, Slovenian, and German which points to a cross-linguistic variation with respect to the perception of numerical bounds of the existential quantifier. In Experiment 2, using a picture choice task, we further examine whether the numerical bound differences correlate with differences in pragmatic interpretations of the quantifier some in English and quelques in French and interpret the results as supporting our hypothesis that some and its cross-linguistic counterparts are subjected to different processes of pragmatic enrichment.

Theory of Mind (ToM) deficits are often attested in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Previous work on ASD has identified links between ToM abilities and knowledge of sentential complements, with the hypothesis that this component of language provides a tool for individuals with ASD to figure out solutions to ToM tasks. However studies on ASD are yet to show if the impact of complementation on ToM performance carries over to instances where ToM is assessed nonverbally. As such, the links identified between ToM tasks and complementation tasks may stem from linguistic difficulties that impact scores across the measures used, rather than from the role played by sentential complements in mental representation. This study is the first to evaluate associations between complements and nonverbal ToM in children with ASD compared to typically developing children of similar nonverbal intellectual ability and general language level. Correlations controlling for nonverbal abilities were found between complements and non-verbal ToM success in the ASD group only. Furthermore, regression analyses showed that competence with complement sentences of verbs of communication explained 30% of the variance in their performance at non-verbal ToM. These findings provide new evidence in favour of the view that sentential complements play a role in ToM reasoning in ASD.

In this contribution, we address the issues concerning the semantic value of Wittgenstein’s subject “I”, as in (i) “I have a toothache”, resulting from the use of predicates that involve first-person knowledge of the mental states to which they refer. As is well-known, these contexts give rise to the phenomenon of ‘immunity to error through misidentification’ (IEM): the utterer of (i) cannot be mistaken as to whether he is the person having a toothache. We provide a series of arguments in favor of a principled distinction between a de facto IEM, grounded in perceptual and proprioceptive judgments, and a de iure IEM, grounded in experience reports whereby the experience wears the experiencer on its sleeve. From this perspective, the no-referent account of subject “I” advocated by Wittgenstein/Anscombe is correct. In fact, we show how this analysis can be made compatible with a Kaplanian account of first-person indexicals, by identifying the speaker in the context of utterance with the person who has access to the reported private experience.

The goal of the current study was to statistically evaluate the reliable scalability of a set of tasks designed to assess Theory of Mind (ToM) without language as a confounding variable. This tool might be useful to study ToM in populations where language is impaired or to study links between language and ToM. Low verbal versions of the ToM tasks proposed by Wellman and Liu (2004) for their scale were tested in 234 children (2.5 years to 11.9 years). Results showed that 5 of the tasks formed a scale according to both Guttman and Rasch models whereas all 6 tasks could form a scale according to the Rasch model only. The main difference from the original scale was that the Explicit False Belief task could be included whereas the Knowledge Access (KA) task could not. The authors argue that the more verbal version of the KA task administered in previous studies could have measured language understanding rather than ToM. (PsycINFO Database Record

Numéro spécial Abstracts of EPNS 2017 - 12th European Paediatric Neurology Society CongressLyon, France20- 24 June 2017 12th European Paediatric Neurology Society Congress, 20 - 24 June 2017; International audience; Objective: The ARX (Aristaless Related homeoboX) gene encodes a transcription factor which mutations have been associated with syndromes ranging from severe neuronal migration defects such as lissencephaly, to mild or moderate forms of X-linked Intellectual Disability (ID) without apparent brain abnormalities. The most frequent ARX mutation (c.429_452dup24), a duplication of 24 base pairs, constitutes a recognizable clinical syndrome with ARX patients exhibiting ID, without primary motor impairment, but with a very specific upper limb distal motor apraxia associated with a pathognomonic hand-grip. Furthermore, patients also exhibit language impairment and an obvious difficulty to execute oro-lingual praxis. The aim of the present study was to better characterize language abnormalities in ARX c.429_452dup24 patients. Methods: We collected data on 16 French ARX patients, and 16 age- and IQ-matched controls (Fragile X (FraX) patients). Given the similarities between ARX mutated patients and FOXP2-mutated patients, we investigated the molecular relationship between Arx and Foxp2. Results: ARX patients have structural language impairments in both receptive and expressive aspects of language compared to FraX patients: phonetic feature recognition, receptive (ECOSSE test for sentence comprehension) and expressive (TCG-R for sentence production) morphosyntactic skills and oro-lingual dyspraxia (movements of the face, tongue, and lips) were significantly more impaired in ARX patients. FraX patients made words more complex and they were less impaired in their ability to articulate words. On the contrary, language pragmatic analysis showed that ARXdup24 patients had significantly better interactional skills than FraX. patients. Interestingly, we found that although Arx has no effect on Foxp2 expression, Arx was found to activate Foxp1 expression, and that the c.429_452dup24 mutation alters the expression of this gene. Foxp1 is known to heterodimerize with Foxp2 and has been involved in language defects. Conclusion: These data uncover a novel role of ARX in language development, probably through the regulation of Foxp1.

This paper discusses Everett’s (Curr Anthropol 46(4):621–646, 2005) claim that Piraha lacks words for the existential and the universal quantifiers. Everett bases his argument on his analysis of the word baasio (the prima facie universal quantifier in Piraha) in an example in which the word is used when the main part of an object or set is concerned rather than the whole. This, or so Everett claims, would be dishonest, given the norms of language use, if baasio meant all. According to him, this is enough to show that baasio cannot be the universal quantifier. However, Everett’s argument entirely neglects the possibility that in such a case baasio could be used non-literally (in an hyperbolic way), just as all can be in English. I conclude that Everett fails to show that baasio is not the universal quantifier in Piraha.