Paula Rubio-Fernández
Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London
Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo

Bart Geurts
Department of Philosophy, University of Nijmegen

(In press, Psychological Science)

Abstract

The experimental record of the last three decades shows that children under four fail all sorts of variations on the standard false-belief task, while more recent studies reveal that infants are able to pass non-verbal versions of the task. We argue that these paradoxical results are an artefact of the type of false-belief tasks that have been used to test infants and children: whereas non-verbal designs allow infants to stay with a protagonist's perspective over a course of events, verbal designs tend to disrupt the perspective-tracking process in various ways, making it too hard for younger children to demonstrate their capacity for perspective tracking. We report three experiments that confirm this hypothesis, showing that 3-year olds can pass a suitably streamlined version of the verbal false-belief task. We conclude that young children can pass the verbal false-belief task provided they are allowed to track the protagonist's perspective without too much disruption.

Rubio-Geurts-ToM.pdf

In recent years, a lively debate ensued on an old issue, namely the proper distinction between semantics and pragmatics against the background of the classical Gricean distinction between 'what is said' and 'what is implicated'. From a linguist's point of view, however, there has always been a regrettable lack of empirical data in this otherwise sophisticated debate. Recently, a new strand of research emerged under the name of experimental pragmatics, the attempt to gain experimental data on pragmatic and semantic issues by using psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methods. This volume brings together work by scholars engaging in experimental research on the semantics/ pragmatics distinction. The contribution of experimental pragmatics to pragmatic and semantic theory is discussed from a number of different angles, ranging from implicature and pragmatic enrichment to pragmatic acquisition, pragmatic impairment, and pragmatic processing. In addition, methodological issues are discussed. The contributions will appeal to theoretical linguists, psycholinguists, neurolinguists, and language philosophers.

To view the link to the announcement go here.
John Benjamins
www.benjamins.com

Experimental Pragmatics 2011, June 2-4, 2011, Barcelona

Submission deadline: February 1, 2011

The 4th biennial Experimental Pragmatics conferences will be held from June 2-4, 2011, at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, under the auspices of the ESF research network EuroXprag.

The Experimental Pragmatics series aims at fostering interaction between linguistic, psychological, and philosophical approaches to utterance interpretation. Previous conferences in this series were held in Cambridge (2005), Berlin (2007), and Lyon (2009).

Invited speakers

David Barner (San Diego)
Ulrike Hahn (Cardiff)
Christopher Kennedy (Chicago)
Asli Ozyurek (Nijmegen)
Paula Rubio-Fernández (Oslo/Princeton)
Yoad Winter (Utrecht)

Submission of abstracts

We invite abstracts for oral presentations as well as posters on any topic related to experimental pragmatics. Abstracts should be strictly anonymous, in pdf format. They should not exceed two pages DIN A4, have 2.5cm margins on all sides, and in 12pt font.

Abstracts must be submitted electronically via Easychair. When you submit your abstract, you will be asked to indicate whether it is submit for oral or poster presentation, or both.

The number of submissions is limited to 1 individual and 1 joint abstract or 2 joint abstracts per author.

Abstracts will be evaluated through peer reviewing. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is February 1, 2011. Authors will be notified by March 1, 2011.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: February 1, 2011
Notification of acceptance: March 1, 2011
Conference date: June 2-4, 2011

Contact Information

Conference website: http://www.euro-xprag.org/events/barcelona-conference/
Email contact: xprag2011@upf.edu

2-4 June 2011

The invited speakers are:

David Barner (San Diego)
Ulrike Hahn (Cardiff)
Chris Kennedy (Chicago)
Asli Ozyurek (Nijmegen)
Paula Rubio-Fernández (Oslo/Princeton)
Yoad Winter (Utrecht)

Information on the Call for Papers will be arriving soon. Stay tuned.

Beyond 'Ever' and 'Any': Challenging Theories of NPI Licensing

University of Goettingen
January 14 and 15, 2011

Workshop website: http://www.negative-polarity-items.uni-goettingen.de/wiki/index.php/BeyondAny

Invited speakers:

Jon Gajewski
Jack Hoeksema
Utpal Lahiri
Bob Levine

Meeting description

Is polarity sensitivity a syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic phenomenon? Licensing theories in all three fields have reached a high level of sophistication. However, theories in the three fields compete rather than converge, which we take to indicate that the phenomenon has not as yet
been fully understood. In this workshop, we propose to focus on under-researched NPIs, under-researched licensing contexts, and to challenge theories by empirical methods from corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics. The list of open issues includes, but is not limited to, the following:

- Polarity items in non-assertive speech acts
- Polarity items with idiosyncratic licensing patterns
- Parasitic licensing
- Intervention effects
- NPIs in pycholinguistics and corpus linguistics
- Historical rise and fall of NPIs
- Patterns of use versus licensing conditions
- Verbal NPIs
- Comparison of approaches

Abstract submissions

We invite papers for 30 min. talks (plus 15 min. discussion) that pertain to one or more of these questions, or offer other new insights in the phenomenon of polarity sensitivity. Abstracts should be anonymous and at most 2 pages in length. Please send your abstracts electronically in pdf- or doc-format to

manfred.sailer@phil.uni-goettingen.de

and include your name, affiliation and the title of the abstract in the body of the email. Submissions will be reviewed by two reviewers.

Important dates

Deadline for submission: September 15, 2010

Notification: October 18, 2010

Workshop: January 14-15, 2011

Workshop organized as part of the Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) to be held in Göttingen, Germany, February 23-25, 2011. (http://dgfs2011.uni-goettingen.de/index_en.html)

Organizers:
Jörg Meibauer, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
(meibauer(at)uni-mainz.de)
Petra Schumacher, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
(petra.schumacher(at)uni-mainz.de)

Keynote speakers:
Robyn Carston (University College London)
Katarzyna M. Jaszczolt (University of Cambridge)

Call deadline: August 31, 2010

Final Call For Papers

Most linguists will agree that 'context' is a fundamental notion for linguistic analysis and theory. But when it comes to pinpoint what exactly a context is, most researchers act reluctantly, i.e. they parameterize their notion according to their empirical or theoretical aims. For example, Bach (2005: 21), in a paper devoted to an attack on so-called contextualists, explains: 'What is loosely called 'context' is the conversational setting broadly construed. It is the mutual cognitive context, or salient common ground. It includes the current state of the conversation (what has just been said, what has just been referred to, etc.), the physical setting (if the conversants are face to face), salient mutual knowledge between the conversants, and relevant broader common knowledge'. However, such definitions cannot substitute a comprehensive theory of context. The very fact that in recent discussions on the semantics-pragmatics interface, rivaling camps such as 'minimalists' versus 'contextualists' entertain quite different notions of
context and context-dependent meaning, shows that there is a need for in-depth discussion of the notion(s) and theories dealing with context. Even in recent psycho- and neurolinguistic research that is devoted to the semantics-pragmatics interface and pragmatic enrichment, it becomes increasingly clear that aspects of contextual knowledge that should be controlled are in fact not always under control, this possibly having to do with the 'emergent' character of context.

Our workshop aims at bringing together all linguists interested in context research, be it from the perspective of the semantics-pragmatics interface in general, from the conversationalist perspective, from computational linguistics, or from psycho- and neurolinguistics. In particular, we invite contributions that focus on specific aspects of contextual information and that are geared towards choosing between distinct notions of context.

Abstract submission

Abstracts are invited for 30-minute talks (20 minutes presentations plus 10 minutes for discussion). Abstracts should be anonymous and confined to one page (including examples and references) with 1-inch margins and a font no smaller than 11 point.

Please send a pdf-file to petra.schumacher(at)uni-mainz.de. The subject of the message should specify 'DGfS Abstract', and the body of the message should include author name(s), affiliation(s) and contact information (including email address), and the title of the abstract.

http://www.linguistic-institute.info/experimental.htm

and the call for papers is here:

http://www.linguistic-institute.info/callexp.htm

Billy

The School of Psychology at Cardiff is one of the largest and most successful departments of psychology in the United Kingdom. There are currently over 50 academic staff, 100+ research staff and a further 20+ Research Fellows (including Royal Society, BBSRC, ESRC, Leverhulme Trust and British Academy Research Fellows). The School also has over 120 full-time students studying for Doctorates, both in research and on our professional Doctorate programmes. The quality and relevance of our research has been recognised in every Research Assessment Exercise. High rankings in the 2008 results follow the highest possible ratings under the assessments in 1996 and 2001.
--
Lewis Bott, PhD
School of Psychology
Cardiff University
Tower Building
Park Place
Cardiff
CF10 3AT
UK

Developments in Experimental Pragmatics

The upcoming issue of LPP aims at presenting and exploring new research evidence concerning a range of pragmatic phenomena by employing experimental methodologies developed in psycholinguistics and experimental social psychology to investigate issues raised in linguistic-pragmatics literature.

We welcome contributions on a wide range of issues, such as: psychology of reasoning, spontaneous communicative inferencing, macro- and micro-pragmatic analysis of reasoning tasks, automaticity vs. controllability of pragmatic processes, psychological and neurophysiological investigations into online comprehension processes of (figurative) communication, weak and strong communication, speaker's meaning versus sentence meaning, processing models of sentence and utterance meaning, figurative language comprehension, direct and indirect speech acts, explicatures and implicatures, reference resolution, quantifiers scope, lexical disambiguation, and other issues of interest to pragmalinguistics.

The interdisciplinary framework of experimental pragmatics offers an opportunity to explore a range of communicative meaning phenomena that have been so far explored separately in autonomous and unconnected domains of linguistics, psychology and neurology. In order to obtain detailed communicative comprehension models of (on-line) meaning construction, interdisciplinary approach needs to be adopted to allow for integrating both theory and research tools of all the branches of cognitive sciences that strive to uncover the nature meaning.

For more information: Go to http://versita.com/science/socialsciences/lpp/

Deadline: 3-May-2010
Contact:
Dr. Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka (LPP editor): iw.plisiecka@gmail.com
Dr. Katarzyna Bromberek-Dyzman, (LPP special issue guest editor) kasia.dyzman@ifa.amu.edu.pl

Thus begins the (draft of the) book entitled Quantity Implicatures by Bart Geurts. To read more click below.

Geurts Q-implicatures.pdf

Department of Philosophy, University of Nijmegen

Closing date: October 5, 2009

These positions are part of a four-year research programme entitled "Quantity matters", which is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The project leader is Bart Geurts. The principal aim of the programme is to develop a comprehensive theory of quantity implicatures. Although the project's central objective is theoretical in nature, it has a significant empirical component as well, involving a range of experimental studies on quantity implicatures that will provide us with a broader and more solid database than is currently available.

For more information on the programme, go here.

REQUIREMENTS
Candidates should have a background in semantics and pragmatics, and preferably have at least some experience with experimental methods.

CONDITIONS OF EMPLOYMENT
Doctoral positions (vacancy number 26.03.09):
- Maximum employment: 1,0 fte
- Maximum salary per month, based on fulltime employment: € 2,612 gross/month
- Duration of the contract: January 1, 2009 - December 31, 2013
Post-doctoral position (vacancy number 26.02.09):
- Maximum employment: 1,0 fte
- Maximum salary per month, based on fulltime employment: € 4,374 gross/month
- Salary scale: 11
- Duration of the contract: January 1, 2009 - December 31, 2011

FURTHER INFORMATION
Bart Geurts
- Telephone: +31 24 361 6217
- E-mail: bart.geurts@phil.ru.nl

APPLICATIONS
Applications should refer to the appropriate vacancy number and include a curriculum vitae, contact information for at least two referees, and a cover letter describing research interests. Applications must be sent before October 5, 2009 to: vacatures@dpo.ru.nl

Research in experimental pragmatics generates data as it tests between theories of pragmatics. After having seen accelerated growth over the last ten years, experimental pragmatics is now in a better position to resolve theoretical disputes, to advance beyond armchair theory-making and to make pragmatic theories more accessible to the cognitive science community at large. As part of an effort to provide a more permanent platform, a Research Network Program known as EURO-XPRAG supported by the ESF is now kicking off through a call for proposals that will support collaborative research.

Proposals that are accepted will bring together teams of at least two researchers to conduct collaborative research in experimental pragmatics. Accepted projects will be reimbursed for travel expenses up to EUR 4000 distributed over a two year period starting October 15th, 2009. The travel expenses must be distributed over two or three short trips, with the first trip taking place in 2009 (see note a in "Further details" at euro-xprag.org).

In addition, successful applicants will be invited to present their projects at a workshop to be held at the University of Leuven, Belgium, on June 10-12, 2010. The workshop's objectives will be to provide feedback on the experimental paradigms and their testing of semantic and pragmatic theory.

Given that the goal of Experimental Pragmatics is to bring together opposing theories around the investigation of specific phenomena, EURO-XPRAG will privilege proposals built around Adversarial Collaborations. Ideally, these consist of a group containing two researchers with opposing points of view on a specific topic and an arbiter. The members of the collaboration would aim to work out in detail specific opposing predictions within an experimental paradigm and ultimately to test those predictions. This has been practiced among cognitive scientists in the past (see Mellers, Hertwig and Kahneman, 2001 for a detailed illustration) and requires a strong arbiter to mount a mutually agreed experiment. See Mellers, Hertwig & Kahnemann, (2001)1, and especially Table 1 (at the website euro-xprag.org) on creating an Adversarial Collaboration.

The potential themes to be covered include, but are not limited to, presupposition, referential terms, metaphor and figurative uses, implicatures, acquisition and development of pragmatics, and lexical pragmatics. Proposals will be evaluated for their overall quality and for the added value they bring to Experimental Pragmatics. Funds are limited to travel expenses linked to the collaboration (i.e. they are not designed for costs related to experimental procedures, which can be covered by other sources or by the host institutions).

For further details, go to http://www.euro-xprag.org/