Developmental Pragmatics in Normal and Abnormal Children

Brain and Language 68, 507–528 (1999) Article ID brln.1999.2125, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Developmental Pragmatics in Normal and Abnormal Children Bruno G. Bara, Francesca M. Bosco, and Monica Bucciarelli Centro di Scienza Cognitiva, Universita` di Torino, Torino, Italy We propose a critical review of current theories of developmental pragmatics. The underlying assumption is that such a theory ought to account for both normal and abnormal development. From a clinical point of view, we are concerned with the effects of brain damage on the emergence of pragmatic competence. In particular, the paper deals with direct speech acts, indirect speech acts, irony, and deceit in children with head injury, closed head injury, hydrocephalus, focal brain damage, and autism. Since no single theory covers systematically the emergence of pragmatic capacity in normal children, it is not surprising that we have not found a systematic account of deficits in the communicative performance of brain injured children. In our view, the challenge for a pragmatic theory is the determination of the normal developmental pattern within which different pragmatic phenomena may find a precise role. Such a framework of normal behavior would then permit the systematic study of abnormal pragmatic development.  1999 Academic Press

In this article we outline a critical review of current theories of pragmatics, namely theories about the use of linguistic and extralinguistic communication in context. In particular, we consider the capacity of such theories to account for the emergence of pragmatic competence in normal children, as well as to explain the pragmatic impairments in abnormal children. Although there are excellent studies characterizing the linguistic deficits of brain damaged children (e.g., Thal & Railly, 1997), the pragmatic side of brain damage has been studied much less extensively. Studying the development of a cognitive process, along with its possible decays and damages, leads to a more complete description of its functioning and can provide a better understanding of how the human mind works (Bara, 1995). We thank our colleagues Steven Small, Brigitte Stemmers, and Maurizio Tirassa, who read and criticized earlier versions of this paper. This research was supported by the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Coordinate Project on Planning and Plan Recognition in Communication, 95.040.19.CT11, 96.01787CT11, and 97.00161.CT11. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Bruno G. Bara, Centro di Scienza Cognitiva, Universita’ di Torino, via Lagrange 3, Torino 10123, Italy. Fax: (011)549653. E-mail: bara,bosco,[email protected]. 507 0093-934X/99 $30.00 Copyright  1999 by Academic Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

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Our article focuses on linguistic pragmatic phenomena because extralinguistic ones have not been systematically investigated in children. A main consequence is that we take into account children from 2-1/2 years old (2– 6) and upward; in fact, children at this age normally display a full mastery of language (Bates, 1993). Before 2 years of age, language comprehension and production are unreliable. This article addresses data on the comprehension and production of speech acts, as they require the same set of mental representations. In addition, our article is concerned with both standard and nonstandard communication as defined by Airenti, Bara, and Colombetti (1993a). Standard communication, which consists of both direct and indirect speech acts (‘‘directs’’ and ‘‘indirects’’), involves both comprehension and production of such speech acts through the use of default rules of inference, i.e., rules which are always valid unless their consequent is explicitly denied (cf. Reiter, 1980). However, not all communication is standard in this sense; nonstandard communication involves comprehension and production of speech acts via explicit inhibition of default rules and the activation of more complex inferential processes. Among the possible nonstandard cases, we investigate the two most relevant ones: irony and deceit. Irony occurs through the intentional violation of one of Grice’s (1975) maxims of cooperation in which the speaker induces the hearer to make a series of inferences based on his realization that the speaker openly intended to break the maxim. Deceits are attempts to communicate a mental state that is not actually entertained by the speaker. The difference between deceit and exploitation relies on the fact that in the former the violation is hidden, while in the latter violation is overtly displayed for communicative purposes. The article is organized according to the different pragmatic phenomena. The reason is twofold. First, we are interested in analyzing each phenomenon in both normal and abnormal development. Second, there are no systematic studies investigating the different pragmatic phenomena within a single pathology. Our choice has been to consider any kind of pragmatic deficit in any kind of brain damage. As a result, the review includes traumatic brain injury, both penetrating and nonpenetrating; hydrocephalus; focal brain damage; and autism. We have included autism, be it a deficit in a ‘‘theory of mind’’ module (Baron-Choen, 1992; Leslie, 1987) or a disorder of executive skill (e.g., Ozonoff & McEvoy, 1994), since in either case it is relevant to neuropsychology (Temple, 1997). PRAGMATICS IN BRAIN DAMAGED CHILDREN

Bruner made influential observations on how children from 3 months onward learn to communicate with the caregiver within a social structure. Indeed, he claims that the concept of format may account for the emergence of pragmatic skills in very young children (Bruner, 1983). A format is a

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stereotyped pattern of interaction between the child and the caregivers where the child learns to make use of linguistic tools in order to communicate (e.g., in the peekaboo game). A format is full of expectations since it is usual and conventional; such features allow the child to learn both to use language and to master the communicative interaction. Bruner’s seminal work was followed by many studies on the development of pragmatic competence (e.g., Ninio & Snow, 1996). Unfortunately, subsequent work failed to keep the promises of these initial studies. The subsequent experiments and observations have not converged, and we still lack a well established theory of normal communicative development. Pragmatic competence is the use of both linguistic and extralinguistic communication in context. The acquisition of pragmatic competence is antecedent to the acquisition of linguistic competence: children are able to communicate much before uttering their first words (Halliday, 1975; Zinober & Martlew, 1985). Here we describe several studies on the linguistic deficits that can affect pragmatic competence. Indeed, since verbal language is the most used expressive channel, many of the studies on abnormal development address questions at this level. Brain development can be divided into two phases. In the first phase an explosive increase in synaptic connections can be observed. By 9 or 10 months most long-range connections in the brain have been established; between 9 and 24 months, the density of synaptic connections rises to 150% of the adult level and a concomitant increase in overall metabolic activity occurs, reaching a peak at about 48 months of age (Nelson, 1996). The second phase is marked by a phenomenon referred to as pruning by Bates and Janowonky (1992). In this phase, a selective elimination of synapses and neurones follows the preceding overproduction, with only a fraction of the total retained into adulthood. The remainder are eliminated in a competition between axons from different neurones over the same synaptic targets (Deacon, 1997). The second phase terminates only around adolescence. Woods and Teuber (1978) claim that the main consequence of this twophase mechanism is that children with early focal brain injury who are impaired in the comprehension and production of speech acts can recover from brain injuries that would cause irreversible damage in an adult. According to Bates (1993), this suggests that there are some initial biases in the human brain, which, under normal circumstances, lead to the familiar adult patterns of brain organization. However, when these default conditions do not apply, the infant brain can find alternative neural and behavioural solutions, resulting in forms of brain organization that are not usually seen in normal or brain-damaged adults. Thus, she proposes a dynamic, quantitative model of brain and behavior where the whole brain participates in language, although the pattern of participation varies, depending on the task at hand, with some regions clearly more important than others. Bates claims that for 1-year-old infants, word comprehension may be viewed as a form of multimodal prob-

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lem solving, requiring integration of many different sources of information, including gesture, facial expression, tone of voice, and a host of situational cues (e.g., ‘‘we are having breakfast now’’). The adult literature on spatial cognitive deficits suggests that the right hemisphere plays a particularly important role in the integration of sensory information: Bates proposes that sensory integration also plays a particularly important role in the first stages of language comprehension, when children have to use many different sources of information to figure out what words mean. Therefore, one might expect a correlation between right-hemisphere damage and delays in the initial stages of language comprehension. This expectation is confirmed by some studies showing that right hemisphere (RH) lesions are sometimes associated with delays in word comprehension in infants (see Marchman, Miller, & Bates, 1991) but not in adults (Brownell et al., 1986; Gardner et al., 1983). Contrary to the claims in favor of substantial plasticity for language in children with focal brain injury, many studies show that left-hemisphere removal always leads to selective deficits in language (see e.g., VarghaKhadem et al. 1991), and that different patterns of impairment result from left- versus right-hemisphere damage (Aram, Ekelman, & Whitaker, 1986; 1987; Varga-Khadem, O’Gorman, & Watters, 1985). The debate seems to lean in favor of plasticity, as most children with lefthemisphere injury are within the normal range (see Stiles & Thal, 1993), while those who fall outside the normal range have complications in addition to their focal brain injury (Vargha-Khadem & Polkey, 1992). However, Bates et al. (1997) and Thal et al. (1991) allow for some early differentiation of the neural systems that mediate different aspects of language processing at an early age. For example, they found that children with unilateral damage to the right hemisphere were at greater risk for delay in word comprehension than children with damage to left-temporal regions, who were at higher risk for delays in productive vocabulary and grammar. Further, Bates (1997) recognizes that brain damaged children usually perform poorer than controls at later ages. Mills, Coffey-Corina and Neville (1997) have used event related potentials (ERPs) to analyze changes in the organization of brain activity linked to the comprehension of single words in 13- to 20-month-old- infants. They found that different ERP components display different lateral asymmetries and may index different aspects of language processing. Their data demonstrated a right-hemisphere asymmetry for both comprehended and unknown words from 13 to 17 months, which suggests that the right hemisphere may play a role in the initial stages of language comprehension. The finding that pragmatic impairment is less severe in early brain damage than with later damage reminds us of the neuropsychological data on language impairment in left-hemisphere lesions. Annett’s (1973) results suggest both a better preservation of language in subjects with early lesions compared

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to later lesions, and that this might be related to the right hemisphere becoming dominant for language. A possible explanation for these findings is that pragmatics is spared with early lesions in a specific area of the brain because the other areas are able to take over pragmatic abilities at early ages but not later. A similar question relates to whether pragmatic impairment depends on the age of lesion onset. In fact, some studies show that brain injury in children can result in persistent selective deficits in pragmatics. Snitzer, Reilly, Bates, and Marchman (1998), for instance, find that deficits in linguistic abilities due to pre- or perinatal unilateral focal brain damage reassert themselves as children face new linguistic challenges. Further, Dennis et al. (1996) point out that children with traumatic brain injury have a deficit of metacognitive skills which are relevant for communication. In a knowledge appraisal task, such children aged 6 to 15 years performed more poorly than the control group in evaluating sentences which contain either a semantic-pragmatic anomaly, e.g., ‘‘My favorite dessert is radios with cream,’’ or a morphological and grammatical anomaly, e.g., ‘‘She was paid the money to the man.’’ Dennis and Barnes (1990) show that children and adolescents with closed head injury have difficulties in certain specific pragmatic tasks, such as knowing the alternate meanings of an ambiguous word in context or bridging the inferential gap between events in stereotyped social situations.1 They claim that an inference is a bridge between the premise and the outcome of a script (Shank & Abelson, 1977) and requires memory of the premise, such that the outcome can be evaluated with reference to it. In a more recent work, Dennis and Barnes (1993) showed that the ability to solve pragmatic tasks like those mentioned is connected to inferential competence. They conducted a study on children and adolescents with hydrocephalus2 and found that the content-impoverished language described in early-onset hydrocephalus appears to reflect deficits in the pragmatic use and understanding of language in discourse. In particular, their results showed that patients with hydrocephalus ages 6–7, 8–9, 10–11, and 14–15 years old were poorer than their control groups in understanding why certain events occur. Eisele, Lust, and Aram (1998) noted inferential deficits in the comprehension of implications and presuppositions in children (aged 4 to 17 years) with unilateral left- or right-hemisphere damage. These children showed deficient performance in presupposing the truth of factive sentences like ‘‘Max knew that he locked the door’’ and in inferring the truth or falsity of implicative 1

Mean age at head injury 9.2 years; mean age at behavioral testing 12.6 years. A dynamic pathological condition of the brain that involves progressive increase in volume of the cerebral ventricles, due to a variety of pathological processes that cause overproduction of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) or obstruction of the passage of CSF between its sites of origin and absorption within the ventricles, subarachnoidspace, or arachnoid villi. Hydrocephalus is accompained by an increase in CSF pressure that moves fluid out of the cells of the brain tissue. (Beaumont, Kenealy, & Rogers, 1996). 2

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sentences such as ‘‘Max remembered to lock the door.’’ The authors conclude that the abilities to perform inferences of truth and to interpret various forms of negation are aspects of language comprehension affected differentially, depending on either early left- or right hemisphere damage. Left hemisphere damage appears to cause grammatical deficits, whereas right hemisphere damage appears more likely to result in semantic deficits. Besides, children with left hemisphere damage, as well as normal children, were more accurate in implication tasks than in presupposition tasks. Children with right hemisphere damage, in contrast, were more proficient in presupposition tasks than in implication tasks. These differences suggest that children with left and right lesions may be deficient in the necessary pragmatic abilities mediating inferences of truth. Pragmatic deficits can occur as a consequence of aphasia as well. As a child manifests difficulties in comprehending and producing language, he finds it all the more difficult to initiate and maintain discourse. Hence, he withdraws from verbal interaction or becomes an inappropriate communicator. Some of these children may have an adequate vocabulary and be able to produce and understand most sentence types. Yet, they do not know when to talk or how to respond appropriately in social discourse (Stark, 1980). Besides the impairments due to brain injuries, a well known pragmatic deficit occurs in autism.3 Loveland et al’s. (1988) study on autistic children (ages from 58 to 255 months), language-delayed children (ages from 36 to 90 months) and normally developing children (ages from 25 to 37 months) shows that autistic children, when compared with the other two groups, have more incidents of no responses, produce fewer turn-taking vocalizations and gestures, and are less likely to initiate communication. In particular, Loveland and colleagues analyzed videotaped free-play sessions of these children with a parent and found that parents of autistic children show more initiating and use of imperatives than other parents. These results suggest that autistic children are less competent even than language delayed children in pragmatic interactions. The studies we have summarized investigate the relationship between theories of pragmatics and empirical data through an analysis of the pragmatic deficits that characterize different sorts of abnormal development. The results of the different investigations are fragmentary and difficult to insert in a unifying framework. A more suitable strategy is to analyze specific prag3 Autistic children have difficulty relating to people early in life. Rutter (1978) proposes four diagnostic criteria: (1) there is onset of the syndrome before the age of 30 months; (2) social development is impaired in ways which are not predictable from the child’s general level of cognitive development; (3) language development is delayed and deviant, also in ways not predictable from the overall level of the child’s intellectual development; and (4) there is an insistence on sameness, as shown by stereotyped play and abnormal preoccupations or resistance to change.

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matic phenomena in normal children and then to consider the same phenomena in children with brain damage. Such a strategy would allow us to compare normal and abnormal children in a systematic way. In the next section, we briefly sketch the pragmatic theories formulated to explain different phenomena. Clinical data will be considered as evidence in support or against different theoretical claims. STANDARD COMMUNICATION: DIRECT AND INDIRECT SPEECH ACTS

In the classic philosophy of language, a well-known distinction is drawn between direct and indirect speech acts. To comprehend an indirect speech act means to realize that an illocutionary act is performed (indirectly) by the execution of another literal illocutionary act (Searle, 1975, 1979). Direct speech acts are those in which a speaker utters a sentence and means exactly and literally what she has said, as in (1) Pass me the salt. In indirect speech acts, the speaker communicates more to the hearer than she has actually stated literally by relying on mutually shared background information and on general powers of rationality and inference-making. (2) a. b. c. d.

Can you please pass me the salt? Do you mind passing me the salt? I wonder if youd be so kind as to pass me the salt. The soup is insipid.

According to Searle, the difference between (1) and (2) is that (1) is straightforward, while (2) relies on some kind of common knowledge. However, the length of the inferential path is not the same for each case in (2). For example, (2d) clearly requires a greater number of inferences than (2a). Searle claims that the primary illocutionary force of an indirect speech act is derived from the literal one via a series of inferential steps. The hearer first attempts to interpret the utterance literally, and only after failure of this attempt, because of the contextual irrelevance of the literal meaning, looks for a different meaning, which conveys the primary illocutionary force. According to the classic theory, an indirect speech act is necessarily harder to comprehend than a direct one. Some authors have criticized this position (cf. Clark, 1979; Recanati,1995; Sperber & Wilson, 1986). In particular, Gibbs (1994) states that indirect speech acts with a conventionalized meaning are simpler to understand than nonconventional ones. Indeed, he proposes that the context specifies the necessity of using a conventional indirect and thus helps the hearer to understand more quickly the intended meaning. Gibbs (1986) claims that a speaker can use an indirect request when she thinks that there might be obstacles

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against granting the request (e.g., when the speaker does not know whether the hearer owns the object she desires), and he suggests that the partner infers the meaning of a conventional indirect speech act via a habitual shortcut that facilitates its comprehension. An alternative proposal is the theory of Cognitive Pragmatics (Airenti, Bara, & Colombetti, 1993a). A major assumption of this theory is that intentional communication requires that the agents act on the basis of a plan that is at least partially shared; we call this plan a behavior game (Airenti, Bara & Colombetti, 1984). The actual actions performed by the agents realize the moves of the behavior game they are playing. The meaning of a communicative act (either linguistic or extralinguistic or, more often, a mix of the two) is fully understood only in the realization that it instantiates a particular move of the behavior game. Through the construction of his first behavior games, the child proceeds from infant interactions to protoconversations to finally reach sophisticated adolescent communication (Airenti, 1998). Thus, the comprehension of any kind of speech act depends on the comprehension by the speaker of the behavioral game bid. A main consequence is that the distinction between direct and indirect speech acts is uninformative from an inferential point of view. The only distinctions that can be drawn concern the chain of inferences required to pass from the utterance to the game it refers to. Direct and conventional indirect speech acts directly refer to the game, and thus we call them simple speech acts. On the contrary, nonconventional indirect speech acts, or complex speech acts, require a chain of inferential steps because it is not immediately clear to which specific behavior game they are associated. To understand (1) it is sufficient for the partner to refer to the behavior game [Give-something]. To understand (2d) a more complex inferential process is necessary: the partner, in order to answer the question, ought to share with the actor the beliefs that insipid soups are not good and that salt makes them better. Only then can the partner attribute to the utterance the expected value in the behavior game [Givesomething]. Both simple and complex speech acts represent cases of standard communication because it is possible to infer their meaning by reference to the game bid by the speaker via default rules of inference. Speech act comprehension and production require both specific and general knowledge. As for the former, knowledge of the meanings of individual words is an example; it is the first prerequisite for understanding the overall literal meaning of an utterance. Further, children must also comprehend the speaker’s communicative intention, viz. which is the game bid by the speaker. A general knowledge of common behavior games is a further prerequisite for understanding the speaker’s meaning (Airenti, 1998). Empirical support for this theoretical position was found consistently by Hudson and Slakman (1990), who demonstrated that the knowledge of stereotyped events helps children make inferences. Once specific and general knowledge are acquired, children experience more difficulty in dealing with complex speech

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acts rather than with simple speech acts, either direct speech acts or conventional indirect speech acts. The final choice among the different proposals is a matter of empirical investigation. Let us briefly report the relevant literature on comprehension of direct and indirect speech acts in children. If Searle is correct, then indirect speech acts should always be harder to deal with than direct ones (indirect ⬎ direct). If Gibbs is correct, then nonconventional indirect speech acts should be harder than conventional indirect speech acts, which in turn, should be equivalent to the direct ones (nonconventional indirect ⬎ conventional indirect ⬅ direct). If Airenti et al. (1993a) are correct, then complex indirect speech acts should be more difficult than simple speech acts, which may indifferently be either direct or indirect acts (complex ⬎ simple: direct or indirect). In support of Searle’s proposal, Garvey (1984) finds that children under 3 years have some difficulties understanding conventional indirect requests made by an adult. The explanation she gives is that such requests are ambiguous in that, according to Searle, they have simultaneously a literal meaning and a directive implicit force. In one particular example, Garvey reports an interaction between a mother and her 32-month-old child. The mother points at a picture in a book and asks the child, ‘‘You see what this little boy is doing?’’ As the child fails to volunteer the information about what he sees and limits his response to ‘‘Yeah,’’ Garvey concludes that indirection is difficult for children. In support of Gibbs’ proposal, Shatz (1978) observed children between 19 and 28 months old playing with their mothers at home and found that they understood conventional indirect requests like ‘‘Can you shut the door?’’ or ‘‘Are there any more suitcases?’’ Shatz concludes that very young children are able to map the language they hear on to the familiar nonlinguistic world of actions and objects. In line with Airenti et al. (1993a), Reeder (1980) finds that children between 30 and 36 months old comprehend that, in an adequate context, utterances like ‘‘I want you to do that’’ or ‘‘Would you mind doing that?’’ have equal illocutionary force (see also Bernicot & Legros, 1987). Furthermore, Becker (1990) and Ervin-Tripp and Gordon (1986) find evidence that 2;6year-old children already produce different kinds of indirect speech acts. Finally, Bara and Bucciarelli (1998) show that 2;6- to 3-year-olds easily comprehend conventional indirect directives (e.g., ‘‘Would you like to sit down?’’) but have difficulty with indirect nonconventional directives (e.g., to understand that answering ‘‘It’s raining’’ to the proposal ‘‘Let’s go out and play’’ corresponds to a refusal to go out to play). There is no evidence to support a specific neuropsychological deficit in the ability to deal with indirect speech acts, either conventional or nonconventional. An exception are autistic children, who have problems in dealing with literalness (cf. Kanner, 1943). In particular, given an indirect speech

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act, either conventional or not, they construct a literal interpretation. For instance, given the utterance ‘‘Can you pass me the salt?’’ they consider the possibility of performing the action and answer ‘‘yes’’, without actually giving the salt to the speaker (see Frith, 1989). Apparently, experimental research on indirect speech act comprehension in children is inconsistent and does not distinguish among the three proposals. In fact, the experimental results of Garvey, which support Searle’s theory, deserve additional consideration. In particular, there is no reason for the child in her study to describe something that his mother can perfectly see; furthermore, Garvey herself admits that she does not really know the actual communicative intention of the mother. Regarding the experimental results on autistic children, it is plausible to assume that, at the very beginning of language comprehension, all indirect speech acts are equally difficult to understand because they all require an inferential chain. This would be in line with Searle’s proposal. However, later on some of them would become conventional by being conventionally associated with a specific meaning by dialogue partners (consistent with Gibbs’ and Airenti et al.’s proposals). Since social interactions are the means to acquire conventions, we would expect that autistic children, given their social impairment, will not learn conventionally to associate an utterance with a specific meaning. As a consequence, they would typically rely on complex inferential chains to assign meaning to an indirect speech act, with a persistent tendency to rely on its literal interpretation. This explanation is consistent with the graded salience hypothesis (Giora, 1997) according to which the salience of an utterance is a function of its conventionality, familiarity, and frequency in a certain context. As a consequence, novel interpretation of a salient meaning involves a sequential process, whereby the salient meaning is processed first, rejected as the intended meaning, and reinterpreted. Novel interpretations must be more difficult to derive and should require more and different contextual support for its derivation. NONSTANDARD COMMUNICATION: IRONY AND DECEIT

In our opinion, the theoretical distinction between simple and complex speech acts, presented in terms of standard communication, also holds for ironic and deceitful speech acts. Indeed, as we shall see, certain ironic speech acts are simple because they immediately contrast with a belief shared by the agents, and others are complex because a series of inferences is needed to detect their contrast with the belief shared by the agents. Also, certain deceitful speech acts are simple because they consist in the denial, on the part of the speaker, of a belief she wishes to conceal from the partner, whereas others are complex because they consist in the denial of a belief that implies the belief she intends to conceal from the partner (Bara, Bosco, & Bucciarelli, 1999).

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Irony The so-called traditional theory of irony was advanced by Grice (1978; 1989), who claims that, in order to comprehend an ironic utterance, the hearer assigns it a meaning opposite to the one literally expressed by the speaker. In particular, he claims that an ironic intention can be detected when the literal interpretation does not fit the context. Unfortunately, ironic utterances may consist of something different from the expression of a meaning opposite the one intended. Further, Grice’s account leaves unclear why a proposition p should be interpreted as an ironic non-p and not as a lie (Morgan, 1990). From a totally different perspective, some theories assume—more or less implicitly—that irony involves the ability to create a metarepresention. Following the tenets of Relevance Theory, Sperber and Wilson (1981) claim that an ironic utterance is intended and interpreted as an echo of a past utterance. Its interpretation does not require the attribution of a precise thought, since the utterance echoes the thought of a person or of people in general. The ironic utterance is an echoic mention where the ironist expresses her attitude toward the proposition she is echoing (see also Jorgensen, Miller, & Sperber, 1984). Airenti, Bara, and Colombetti (1993b) explain irony on the basis of shared knowledge. A statement uttered by an actor becomes ironic when compared with the scenario provided by the knowledge she shares with the partner. The partner infers a further meaning which contrasts with the background against which the ironic utterance stands out (see Fig. 1). Grice’s proposal, according to which an ironic utterance expresses the opposite of what is meant by the speaker, is consistent with some results with very young children. For instance, Reddy (1991) found that humor in young infants comes from a violation of expectation (not-p) of the canonical outcome (p) of an interactive event such as giving and taking. Dunn (1991) has analyzed children’s jokes, finding that 2- and 3-year-olds have a consid-

FIG. 1. Actor A expresses the ironic utterance p which overtly contrasts with the belief q, shared between A and B.

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erable and differentiated understanding of what other (familiar) people will find funny. These results are inconsistent with the assumption that irony requires a metarepresentational ability. Indeed, infants and very young children lack the ability to form metarepresentations about others. However, the proposal according to which irony involves a metarepresentational ability is consistent with some experiments with children older than those mentioned above. Lucariello and Mindolovich (1995) carried out a study on the ability of 6- and 8-years olds to produce ironic endings of stories: they claim that the recognition and construction of ironic events involves the metarepresentational skill of manipulating event representations. These representations must be transcended, critically viewed, and disassembled in order to create new and different (and ironic) event structures. According to their model, it is possible to make a distinction between simple and complex forms of ironies. Consistent with this idea, Dews et al. (1996) claim that either ironic comments state explicitly the opposite of what they mean (direct irony), or they imply something that is the opposite of what is said (indirect irony). In the former case, the speaker’s meaning simply is the opposite of what is said, while in the latter, it follows from the opposite of what is said. Their results show that 6 to 7 year olds ranked the indirect irony as the meanest more often than direct irony. Happe`’s (1993) study on irony comprehension in normal and autistic 4year-old children reveals a relation between the degree of metarepresentational ability and the degree of communicative skill. This conclusion is consistent with Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986). Indeed, the authors argue that in expressing an ironic utterance, we are both mentioning and expressing an attitude toward a particular thought; understanding irony requires an understanding of second-order metarepresentation, i.e., a thought about an attributed thought. In a further experiment on autistic children and children with mild learning disabilities matched for verbal IQ, Happe` (1993) found that Relevance theory predicted the degree of ‘‘theory of mind’’ necessary for understanding irony. Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states to others (Premack & Woodruff, 1978). Two classic tasks measure this ability. The first-order false belief task requires the subjects to distinguish between their beliefs and the (false) beliefs of a partner. The second-order false belief task requires subjects to deal with the (false) beliefs of one character about the beliefs of another character, i.e., to form a meta-representation. In her study, Happe` found out that autistic children—who failed a second-order false belief task—were significantly worse than the children with mild learning disabilities—who passed the task—at choosing the correct, nonliteral interpretation of an ironic utterance in a story context. Unfortunately, there are no studies on children with traumatic brain injury, hydrocephalus, or focal brain damage that allow us to falsify any of the

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alternative proposals. However, some studies do suggest that one or another of these theories could fail to account for certain noncommunicative inferential tasks. Eisele, Lust, and Aram (1998), for instance, found that children (aged 7 to 14 years) with unilateral left- or right-hemisphere damage have inferential deficits comprehending implications and presuppositions. Children and adolescents with closed head injury4 perform worse than normal pairs when asked to make coherent inferences in order to link two connected events (Dennis & Barnes, 1990). The authors find the same difficulty in children with hydrocephalus aged 6 to 15 years old (Dennis & Barnes, 1993) along with difficulty in drawing inferences to elaborate the content of a story (Dennis & Barnes, 1998). Therefore, if complex ironies differ from simple ironies in inferential load, we would expect children with these pathologies to have difficulty dealing with complex ironies but not with simple humorous utterances. Alas, no one has investigated irony comprehension and production in abnormal development. In conclusion, the experimental data are not easily reconcilable with the theories, since no current theory can distinguish simple and complex ironies. Metarepresentational ability might be involved only in the latter. In our view, the capacity to understand and produce ironic acts develops in two stages. In the first stage, children start mastering simple irony a´ la Grice: a person utters p to mean not-p. In the second stage, children learn to manage more subtle inferences until they reach the complex levels of indirect irony revealed by experimental data. Deceit Deceits occur when a deceiver intentionally carries out a critical act which affects the opponent’s beliefs in such a way that his behavior results in an expedient outcome for the deceiver. For genuine deception, it is necessary to eliminate the possibility that there is an innate tendency to carry out the critical act in that particular setting (Mitchell, 1986). Perner (1991) claims that a deceit is an actor’s attempt to manipulate a partner’s mental state, i.e., to induce the partner to believe something wrong about reality. By contrast, interactions like the following are called pseudolies by Perner: Mother: Was it you who broke the vase? Child: No, it was Bob. In this case the child’s real attempt is not to manipulate the mother’s beliefs—in Perner’s view—but to avoid a disagreeable consequence, i.e., to be rebuked. Consistently, Bussey (1992) and Lewis, Stanger, and Sullivan 4

Mean age at head injury, 9;2; mean age at behavioral testing, 12;6.

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(1989) find that children start to use lies from the age of 3 onward so as to escape disagreeable consequences. Leekman (1992) states that the liar aims to achieve some goal by saying something that she knows or believes is false. Peskin (1996) claims that in order to plan or understand a deceit, it is necessary that the speaker take as shared something she does not believe and that the hearer comes to hold as a false belief. He concludes that, whereas 3-year-olds understand the former, only 4-year-olds understand the latter, i.e., the deceptive purpose of the actor. As predicted, Peskin (1989) finds that only at 5–6 years of age children do start to deceive a partner by inducing him to have a false belief about reality. Consistently with these hypotheses, children younger than 4 years old are not able to deal with false belief tasks (see, e.g., Flavell, et al., 1981; Hogrefe, et al., 1986; Perner, 1991; Wellman & Wooley, 1990; Wimmer & Perner, 1983). Furthermore, many studies have detected a tight connection between children’s ability to attribute mental states and their ability both to comprehend (Peskin, 1996; Ruffman, et al., 1993; Sullivan, Winner & Hopfield, 1995) and to plan (Chandler, Fitz, & Hala, 1989; Sinclair, 1996; Sodian, 1994; Sodian et al., 1991) deceits. Thus, lies are by definition easier to comprehend and to produce than are deceits (see Sodian, 1991). However, this could be for a different reason from the one hypothesized by Perner. In our view, a lie can be considered a simple form of deceit whose goal is to modify the partner’s mental state. In line with this analysis, Siegal and Peterson (1996) find that 3-year-olds can often determine that a lie is based on a deliberate distortion of secret knowledge, whereas a mistake is based on a lack of knowledge that an actor wrongly believes to be true. The crucial point is that all deceits do not share the same complexity of construction: a lie consists of straightforward negation, on the part of the deceiver, of a belief that she believes to be true, whereas planning a deceit involves a greater number of inferential steps. Airenti et al. (1993b) define a deceit as a premeditated rupture of the rules governing sincerity in an active behavior game. Deceiving requires that the actor break the sincerity rule and construct a suitable strategy to modify the partner’s knowledge. For example, an actor, while privately believing that p is false, might try to convince the partner that p is true. If the attempt succeeds, the partner believes p to be shared with the actor (see Fig. 2). If deceits are attempts to modify a partner’s mental state, they can vary according to the complexity of the mental representations involved. Peskin (1989), when emphasizing the differences between lies and deceits, acknowledges that the metarepresentational capacity involved in deceits implies the coordination of ‘‘two conflicting representations.’’ As the ability to represent complex situations through complex representations increases with the age, and because complex deceits require construction of complex representations, we would expect children to become more accomplished prevaricators as they grow up.

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FIG. 2. Actor A deceives partner B. While A believes not-p she tries to induce B to consider p as shared with A.

Empirical studies involving developmental or acquired neuropsychological deficits and their effects on pragmatic competence suggest that both theory of mind and the ability to construct and manipulate mental representations are involved in deceits. On one hand, autistic people, who have difficulty in theory of mind tasks (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985), are not able to comprehend or plan deceits (Sodian & Frith, 1992, 1993). Yirmiya et al. (1996), for example, invite autistic children to use deception in order to manipulate the behavior of another person and to verbalize their understanding of what they are doing. The results show exceptionally poor performance in the latter task and suggest that the autistics’ deficit might correlate with executive control functions. These results are consistent with the assumption that some components of deceit, but not others, are accessible to the thoughts of autistic persons. On the other hand, Russell, Jarrold, and Potel (1995) find that, in 3- and 4-year olds, deceptive tasks make significant executive demands, a core difficulty with strategic deception. Furthermore, the complexity of deceits in terms of planning demands has never been considered. It appears that the emergence of deceit is allowed both by the appearance of the theory of mind and the increasing capacity to construct and manipulate complex representations. On one hand, if young children are poor at theory of mind tasks, then they should not be able to simulate the effects of their deceitful moves on the others’ minds. This prediction has been confirmed by Sodian and colleagues (Sodian, 1994; Sodian et al., 1991), who argue that children below the age of 3;6 do not master the concept of belief. On the other hand, if the increasing capacity to construct and manipulate complex representations is also involved in deceits, we would predict that a deceptive task could be made easier by reducing the number of characters, episodes, and scenes and by including a context. Sullivan, Zaitchik, and TagerFlusberg (1994) have carried out just such an experiment on preschoolers and kindergarteners, and confirm this prediction. Moreover, Russell, Jarrold,

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and Potel (1995) have found that executive requirements play a significant role in making complex deception hard for children as young as 3 years of age: when the opponent is removed from a test of complex deception, divergence between the performance of 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds remains essentially unaffected. The authors claim that 3-year-olds’ difficulty with complex deception is not caused by an inability to conceive of implanting false beliefs into another person’s mind, i.e., by a theory of mind deficit, but by the cognitive load required by intricate deceits. CONCLUSIONS

When we began the preparation of this article, our greatest fear was to have an overwhelming amount of data to cover. However, now that we are concluding our analysis, we are impressed most by the scarcity of relevant data. The literature on the development of pragmatics in brain damaged children is fragmentary and is not systematic. In concluding, let us try to explain the reasons for this unexpected conclusion and to suggest some remedies. Theoreticians usually come from philosophical or linguistic traditions: in both fields, development is considered a minor problem in that performance at the steady state is the real issue (for a different perspective, see Bosco & Tirassa, 1998; Trevarthen, 1979). These scholars are most interested in how full mastery of communicative ability can be reached. Currently, no single theory covers systematically the emergence of pragmatic capacity. We do not have a unitary account of the major phenomena, viz. direct, indirect, ironic, and deceitful speech acts. Nor do we have a protocol by which to assess the normal stages at which a child is expected to produce and comprehend the different kinds of speech acts. Important as they could be, it is simply not possible to study deficits in communication without a comparable basis in normal development. With this in mind, it is therefore not surprising that we have not found a systematic account of the deficits of communicative performance in children with traumatic brain injury, hydrocephalus, focal brain damage, or autism. A necessary step is the development of a baseline framework within which at least irony and deceit may find a precise place. With such a characterization, different types of brain pathologies could show their specificity by detailed comparison with normal behavior. In the clinical arena, even individual patients could benefit from such normative data, e.g., children with frontal damage could have their communicative ability tested through a standardized explicit method rather than by qualitative impressions. A first attempt in this direction has been Relevance Theory. However, it has not yet given rise to wide, systematic predictions on pragmatic development in normal and abnormal children. A second attempt is Cognitive Pragmatics. This theory predicts graded difficulty among speech acts from the easiest to the most difficult: simple speech acts, complex speech acts, ironic

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speech acts, comprehension of deceptive speech acts, and planning of deceptive speech acts. The predicted hierarchy of difficulty has been confirmed empirically on normal children in multiple age groups (Bara & Bucciarelli, 1998). The same hierarchy of difficulty has been experimentally confirmed in adults with closed head injury (Bara, Tirassa, & Zettin, 1997) and in Alzheimer’s patients (Bara, Bucciarelli, & Geminiani, 1999). However, this theory has not been tested on brain damaged children. In conclusion, our review suggests that two main factors affect the emergence of pragmatic competence: first, the ability to attribute mental states to others (i.e., theory of mind); and second, the ability to construct and manipulate complex representations of the communicative interaction (i.e., cognitive load). A few of the theories we have discussed try to account for these factors; the others do not even consider possible relations between pragmatics and the brain and therefore cannot accommodate clinical data. The time has come for a comprehensive framework that can both provide a competential model of cognitive pragmatics and predict and explain the actual performance of normal and abnormal children. The emergence of communicative ability should be studied in a unifying perspective able to account for the differential difficulty of myriad pragmatic phenomena. With this in hand, pathological performance could be analyzed and deconstructed into impairments of specific subcomponents, such as representational complexity, inferential load, metarepresentational ability, and planning capacity. Ideally, specific deficits found in both brain damaged and abnormal development should be explained in terms of specific communicative impairments. For instance, it is not enough to note that patients with traumatic brain injury are poorer than normal subjects in comprehending deceits. The goal is to attribute such a degradation in performance to specific damage in a cognitive or a neurobiological system, which are crucial for deceiving. The challenge for theoreticians, experimenters, and clinicians is to analyze the links among the emergence of pragmatic competence in normal children, the cerebral localization of its basic subcomponents, and the communicative deficits observed. It might not be the localization of different subcomponents in the brain that gives us the complete picture of the emergence of pragmatic competence in normal and abnormal children. As we pointed out at the outset, when discussing the localization of language processes, the nature and extent of brain plasticity over time is a controvertial issue, and thus brain plasticity in children may complicate the localization of the sought-after mental processes. REFERENCES Airenti, G. 1998. Dialogue in a developmental perspective. In J. Scnerjrkoba, O. Hoffmannova, & J. Svetla (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Dialogue Analysis. Tu¨bingen: Niemeyer.

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