Forgács Bálint
Department of Experimental and Neurocognitive Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Department of Cognitive Psychology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2024 May 24;18:1384116. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2024.1384116. eCollection 2024.
The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in developmental science as well. The relation between linguistic form and content has been loosened up in recent pragmatic approaches to communication, showing that code-based models of language comprehension must be augmented by context-sensitive, pragmatic-inferential mechanisms to recover the speaker's intended meaning. Language acquisition has traditionally been thought to involve building a mental lexicon and extracting syntactic rules from noisy linguistic input, while communicative-pragmatic inferences have also been argued to be indispensable. Recent research findings exploring the electrophysiological indicator of semantic processing, the N400, have raised serious questions about the traditional separation between semantic decoding and pragmatic inferential processes. The N400 appears to be sensitive to mentalization-the ability to attribute beliefs to social partners-already from its developmental onset. This finding raises the possibility that mentalization may not simply contribute to pragmatic inferences that enrich linguistic decoding processes but that the semantic system may be functioning in a fundamentally mentalistic manner. The present review first summarizes the key contributions of pragmatic models of communication to language comprehension. Then, it provides an overview of how communicative intentions are interpreted in developmental theories of communication, with a special emphasis on mentalization. Next, it discusses the sensitivity of infants to the information-transmitting potential of language, their ability to pick up its code-like features, and their capacity to track language comprehension of social partners using mentalization. In conclusion, I argue that the recovery of meaning during linguistic communication is not adequately modeled as a process of code-based semantic retrieval complemented by pragmatic inferences. Instead, the semantic system may establish meaning, as intended, during language comprehension and acquisition through mentalistic attribution of content to communicative partners.
我们确立意义的方式不仅在语言研究中，而且在发展科学中都是一个深刻的问题。在最近关于交流的语用学方法中，语言形式与内容之间的关系已经变得松散，这表明基于代码的语言理解模型必须通过上下文敏感的语用推理机制来加以补充，以便理解说话者的意图。传统上认为语言习得涉及构建心理词典并从嘈杂的语言输入中提取句法规则，同时也有人认为交际语用推理也是不可或缺的。最近探索语义加工电生理指标N400的研究结果，对语义解码和语用推理过程之间的传统区分提出了严重质疑。从其发展开始，N400似乎就对心理化——将信念归因于社会伙伴的能力——敏感。这一发现提出了一种可能性，即心理化可能不仅仅有助于丰富语言解码过程的语用推理，而且语义系统可能以一种根本的心理主义方式运作。本综述首先总结了交流语用模型对语言理解的关键贡献。然后，概述了在交流发展理论中交际意图是如何被解释的，特别强调了心理化。接下来，讨论了婴儿对语言信息传递潜力的敏感性、他们识别语言代码特征的能力以及他们利用心理化追踪社会伙伴语言理解的能力。总之，我认为语言交流中意义的恢复不能充分地被建模为一个基于代码的语义检索过程，并辅之以语用推理。相反，语义系统可能在语言理解和习得过程中，通过将内容心理主义地归因于交际伙伴来确立意义。
