Abstract
In my comment on Foster-Cohen and Wong (Early intervention at the interface: semantic-pragmatic strategies for facilitating conversation with children with developmental disabilities. In: Depraetere I, Salkie R (eds) Drawing a line. Perspectives on the semantics-pragmatics interface. Springer, Cham, pp 00–01, 2016), I focus on how pragmatic impairment and strategies to improve pragmatic behaviour contribute to our understanding of the semantics-pragmatics interface. I argue that the two main points papers like theirs show are the following: first, in studying pragmatics, we cannot purely rely on competence, but we have to take into account performance, that is, actual behaviour; second, there is no straightforward subsequency relation between semantics and pragmatics: pragmatics intervenes before and after semantics.
To date, the study of pragmatic impairments has had virtually no impact on pragmatic theory or on mainstream pragmatics generally. This is a pity. Linguistic communication typically appears to be a single, seamless process, but it is only when it goes wrong that we tend to have any inkling that it is really a complex of interacting processes. (Perkins 2007, 8)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
See, e.g., Geurts and Rubio-Fernández (2015). Grice arguably never intended to provide an account of cognitive processes.
- 2.
I use the term ‘appropriate’ rather than the more normative ‘normal’. Appropriate behaviour depends on the context and on the agent engaged in the behaviour: in many societies, what is appropriate (or at least tolerated) for some age class would be strongly inappropriate for other age groups, and many social categories entail behavioural expectations on how to deal with them.
- 3.
Teaching provides a sometimes sobering illustration of this fact.
- 4.
Apart from its intrinsic interest, I happen to be more acquainted with ASD than with other disorders entailing some form of pragmatic impairment.
- 5.
In some subdomains, e.g., scalar implicatures, they seem to be indistinguishable from the general population (see, e.g., Chevallier et al. 2010).
- 6.
The proportion of non-verbal autists varies according to source and to what is to count as ‘non-verbal’; Wan et al. (2011, 1) mention that ‘[u]p to 25 % of individuals with ASD lack the ability to communicate with others using speech sounds’; Cummings (2014, 37) reports that [a]pproximately 50 % of individuals with autistic disorder do not develop functional speech.
- 7.
Once again, this classification focuses on behaviour: one cannot take it for granted that a person who is not using language (in a neurotypical way or not at all) has not acquired language. A non-verbal autist might in principle have acquired normal comprehension capabilities and simply not be interested in using them in production tasks.
- 8.
Another precautionary note: I do not wish to claim that social communication and pragmatic abilities are the only factors delaying language acquisition. For instance, it has been noticed that the auditory processing of speech sounds in individuals with ASD differs from their neurotypical counterparts (see Haesen et al. 2010). This is likely to interfere with language acquisition. Nevertheless, I will argue below that specific features and difficulties of autistic behaviour in communication are likely to impact lexical acquisition.
- 9.
While we do not (yet) know how the learning of word order by a child actually works, one can construct mathematical proofs of specific learning strategies and their success on given types of input strings. For a presentation, see Lappin and Clark (2011).
- 10.
Unfortunately, the direct observation of mind states of other persons (and even of one’s owns) is not an obvious task, even given modern (medical and other) machinery. From an engineering point of view, what currently seems to work best are techniques using massive amounts of data on behaviour for statistical prediction. And while Facebook and Google do not have mind-reading engines, if they send you ads for divorce lawyers, you better start to worry.
- 11.
See de Clercq (2002) for a wealth of highly enjoyable observations with respect to this issue. Unfortunately, this book does not seem to be available in English. Controlled experiments have given rise to hypotheses applying ToM-deficit theories to lexical acquisition as well. However, Perkins et al. (2006) failed to ascertain inappropriateness of vocabulary use in verbal autists. As these authors discuss, this might be an artefact of their way of encoding and exploiting their data.
- 12.
The metaphor of a circle is possibly not the best; instead of evoking the vicious circle, it might be better to consider it to be a (virtuous) spiral, one type of meaning leading to discovering even more meaning.
- 13.
I would prefer to state this more precisely in a referential way, or containing conceptual grounding (see, e.g., Steels 2008), as the inference of the entity (or class of entities) the speaker intended to refer to.
- 14.
See Peláez (2009).
- 15.
Notice that in most of the dialogues transcribed by Foster-Cohen and Wong (2016), grammaticality is marginal, and enforcing grammaticality does not appear to be the primary goal of intervention.
- 16.
Similarly, neurotypical prelinguistic infants do communicate efficiently with their environment.
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM 5) (5th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. London: Oxford University Press.
Baron-Cohen, S., Cox, A., Baird, G., Swettenham, J., Nightingale, N., Morgan, K., Drew, A., & Charman, T. (1996). Psychological markers in the detection of autism in infancy in a large population. British Journal Of Psychiatry, 168, 158–163.
Benz, A., Jäger, G., van Rooij, R. (Eds.) (2006). Game theory and pragmatics. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Chevallier, C., Wilson, D., Happé, F., & Noveck, I. (2010). Scalar inferences in autism spectrum discorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 40, 1104–1117.
Chomsky, N. (1959). A review of B. F. Skinner’s verbal behavior. Language, 35(1), 26–58. http://cogprints.org/1148/.
Clark, E. V. (2009). First language acquisition (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cloud, D. (2015). The domestication of language. Cultural evolution and the uniqueness of the human animal. New York: Columbia University Press.
Cummings, L. (2014). Pragmatic disorders. Dordrecht: Springer.
de Clercq, H. (2002). Dis maman, c’est un homme ou un animal? Mouans Sartoux: AFD Éditions.
Dennett, D. C. (1987). The intentional stance. Cambridge: Bradford Books/MIT Press.
Foster-Cohen, S., & Wong, T. P. (2016). Early intervention at the interface: Semantic-pragmatic strategies for facilitating conversation with children with developmental disabilities. In I. Depraetere & R. Salkie (Eds.), Drawing a line. Perspectives on the semantics-pragmatics interface (pp. 00–01). Cham: Springer.
Geurts, B., & Rubio-Fernández, P. (2015). Pragmatics and processing. Ratio 28(4), 446–469. https://www.academia.edu/10845909/Pragmatics_and_processing.
Gold, K. (2008). Using sentence context and implicit contrast to learn sensor-grounded meanings for relational and deictic words: The TWIG system. PhD thesis, Yale University.
Grice, H. P. (1975) Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics. Speech acts (Vol. 3, pp. 41–58). New York: Academic Press.
Haesen, B., Boets, B., & Wagemans, J. (2010). A review of behavioural and electrophysiological studies on auditory processing and speech perception in autism spectrum disorders. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 701–714. doi:10.1016/j.rasd.2010.11.006.
Hayes, S. C., Barnes-Holmes, D., & Roche, B. (Eds.) (2001). Relational frame theory. A post-Skinnerian account of human language and cognition. New York: Kluwer.
Heal, N. A., & Hanley, G. P. (2011). Embedded prompting may function as embedded punishment: Detection of unexpected behavioral processes within a typical preschool teaching strategy. Journal of Applied Behaviour Analysis, 44, 127–131.
Heal, N. A., Hanley, G. P., & Layer, S. A. (2009). An evaluation of the relative efficacy of and children’s preferences for teaching strategies that differ in amount of teacher directedness. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 42, 123–143.
Katsos, N., & Wilson, E. (2014). Convergence and divergence between word learning and pragmatic inferencing. In Degen, J., Franke, M., & Goodman, N. (Eds.), Proceedings of the formal & experimental pragmatics workshop (pp. 14–20). Tübingen: ESSLLI.
Lappin, S., & Clark, A. (2011). Linguistic nativism and the poverty of the stimulus. Oxford: Blackwell.
Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive meanings. The theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lewis, D. (1969). Convention. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Peláez, M. (2009). Joint attention and social referencing in infancy as precursors of derived relational responding. In R. A. Rehfeldt & Y. Barnes-Holmes (Eds.), Derived relational responding (pp. 63–78). Oakland: New Harbinger Press.
Perkins, M. (2007). Pragmatic impairment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Perkins, M. R., Dobbinson, S., Boucher, J., Bol, S., & Bloom, P. (2006). Lexical knowledge and lexical use in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 36(6), 795–805.
Peters, C. (2012). Effects of asking autistic children questions during play. Master’s thesis, Bangor University.
Van Orman Quine, W. (1960). Word and object. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Rehfeldt, R. A., & Barnes-Holmes, Y. (Eds.) (2009). Derived relational responding. Oakland: New Harbinger Press.
Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. Acton: Copley Publishing Group.
Smith, K., Smith, A. D. M., & Blythe, R. A. (2011). Cross-situational learning: An experimental study of word-learning mechanisms. Cognitive Science, 35, 480–498. doi:10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01158x.
Steels, L. (2008). The symbol grounding problem has been solved. So what’s next? In M. de Vega, A. Glenberg, & A. Graesser (Eds.), Symbols and embodiment: Debates on meaning and cognition (pp. 223–244). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tomasello, M. (2000). The social-pragmatic theory of word learning. Pragmatics, 10(4), 401–413.
Törneke, N. (2010). Learning RFT. An introduction to relational frame theory and its clinical application. Oakland: New Harbinger Publications.
Wan, C. Y., Bazen, L., Baars, R., Libenson, A., Zipse, L., Zuk, J., Norton, A., & Schlaug, G. (2011). Auditory-motor mapping training as an intervention to facilitate speech output in non-verbal children with autism: a proof of concept study. PloS ONE, 6(9), e25505. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0025505.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Ilse Depraetere and Raf Salkie for organising a very interesting seminary on pragmatics at the University Lille 3, of which this book is a result. They provided me with an opportunity to delve into the issue of pragmatic impairment (and other rims of pragmatics). Ilse Depraetere and Susan Foster-Cohen read a draft version of the text and provided useful comments and suggestions for improvement. Finally, my gratitude goes to my family, who got me into this. The standard disclaimers apply.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Schaden, G. (2017). Appropriate Pragmatic Behaviour: Response to Foster-Cohen and Wong. In: Depraetere, I., Salkie, R. (eds) Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32247-6_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32247-6_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-32245-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-32247-6
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)