Chapter 12: The Social Side of Language

12.1 Tiny Mind Readers or Young Egocentrics?

• Social interaction enhances language learning
• Researchers at Work 12.1: Learning through social interaction
• Box 12.1: Social gating is for the birds
• Children are selective learners
• Limits to children’s mind-reading abilities
• Method 12.1: Referential communication tasks
• Box 12.2: Does language promote mind reading?
• 12.1 Questions to Contemplate

12.2 Conversational Inferences: Deciphering What the Speaker Meant

• “Soft” and “hard” meanings
• How do rational speakers behave?
• Language at Large 12.1 On lying and implying in advertising
• Box 12.3: Examples of scalar implicature
• At what age do children derive conversational inferences?
• Conversational inferences in real time
• Brain networks for thinking about thoughts
• Box 12.4: Using conversational inference to resolve ambiguity
• Language at Large 12.2: Being polite, indirectly
• 12.2 Questions to Contemplate

12.3 Audience Design

• Are speakers sensitive to comprehension demands?
• Syntactic ambiguity and audience design
• The importance of feedback from hearers
• 12.3 Questions to Contemplate

12.4 Dialogue

• Conversation as a collaborative process
• Language at Large 12.3: Why are so many professors bad at audience design?
• Establishing common ground between conversational partners
• How much mind reading takes place during conversation?
• 12.4 Questions to Contemplate
• Digging Deeper: Autism research and its role in mind-reading debates

© 2019 Oxford University Press