Appropriate Pragmatic Behaviour: Response to Foster-Cohen and Wong

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.

[1]  H. Grice.  Logic and conversation , 1975 .

[2]  J. Wagemans,et al.  A review of behavioural and electrophysiological studies on auditory processing and speech perception in autism spectrum disorders , 2011 .

[3]  D. Dennett.  The Intentional Stance. , 1987 .

[4]  G. P. Hanley,et al.  Embedded prompting may function as embedded punishment: detection of unexpected behavioral processes within a typical preschool teaching strategy. , 2011, Journal of applied behavior analysis.

[5]  Michael R. Perkins.  Pragmatic Impairment: Acknowledgements , 2007 .

[6]  Noam Chomsky.  Review of B.F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior , 1959 .

[7]  Gerhard Jäger,et al.  Game Theory and Pragmatics , 2005 .

[8]  Willard Van Orman Quine,et al.  Word and Object , 1960 .

[9]  G. P. Hanley,et al.  An evaluation of the relative efficacy of and children's preferences for teaching strategies that differ in amount of teacher directedness. , 2009, Journal of applied behavior analysis.

[10]  Kenny Smith,et al.  Cross-Situational Learning: An Experimental Study of Word-Learning Mechanisms , 2011, Cogn. Sci..

[11]  Michael Tomasello,et al.  The social-pragmatic theory of word learning. , 2000 .

[12]  P. Bloom,et al.  Lexical Knowledge and Lexical Use in Autism , 2006, Journal of autism and developmental disorders.

[13]  Shalom Lappin,et al.  Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus , 2011 .

[14]  Tony Charman,et al.  Psychological Markers in the Detection of Autism in Infancy in a Large Population , 1996, British Journal of Psychiatry.

[15]  D. Cloud.  The Domestication of Language: Cultural Evolution and the Uniqueness of the Human Animal , 2014 .

[16]  Bart Geurts,et al.  Pragmatics and Processing , 2015 .

[17]  S. Levinson.  Presumptive Meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature , 2001 .

[18]  Janet B W Williams,et al.  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , 2013 .

[19]  N. Törneke.  Learning RFT: An Introduction to Relational Frame Theory and Its Clinical Application , 2010 .

[20]  G. Schlaug,et al.  Auditory-Motor Mapping Training as an Intervention to Facilitate Speech Output in Non-Verbal Children with Autism: A Proof of Concept Study , 2011, PloS one.

[21]  Brian Scassellati,et al.  Using sentence context and implicit contrast to learn sensor-grounded meanings for relational and deictic words: the twig system , 2008 .

[22]  B. Roche,et al.  Relational frame theory : A post-Skinnerian account of human language and cognition , 2004 .

[23]  Deirdre Wilson,et al.  Scalar Inferences in Autism Spectrum Disorders , 2010, Journal of autism and developmental disorders.