dc.contributor.author
Forgács, Bálint
dc.date.accessioned
2024-06-24T06:10:48Z
dc.date.available
2024-06-24T06:10:48Z
dc.identifier.uri
https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/43926
dc.identifier.uri
http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/refubium-43636
dc.description.abstract
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.
en
dc.format.extent
18 Seiten
dc.rights
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
dc.rights.uri
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.subject
language comprehension
en
dc.subject
social cognition
en
dc.subject
semantic processing
en
dc.subject
mentalization
en
dc.subject
theory-of-mind
en
dc.subject
language acquisition
en
dc.subject.ddc
100 Philosophie und Psychologie::150 Psychologie::150 Psychologie
dc.title
Meaning as mentalization
dc.type
Wissenschaftlicher Artikel
dc.date.updated
2024-06-21T14:37:04Z
dcterms.bibliographicCitation.articlenumber
1384116
dcterms.bibliographicCitation.doi
10.3389/fnhum.2024.1384116
dcterms.bibliographicCitation.journaltitle
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
dcterms.bibliographicCitation.volume
18
dcterms.bibliographicCitation.url
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2024.1384116
refubium.affiliation
Erziehungswissenschaft und Psychologie
refubium.affiliation.other
Arbeitsbereich Allgemeine und Neurokognitive Psychologie
refubium.resourceType.isindependentpub
no
dcterms.accessRights.openaire
open access
dcterms.isPartOf.eissn
1662-5161
refubium.resourceType.provider
DeepGreen