Does Lexical Coordination Affect Epistemic and Practical Trust? The Role of Conceptual Pacts.

The present study investigated whether humans are more likely to trust people who are coordinated with them. We examined a well-known type of linguistic coordination, lexical entrainment, typically involving the elaboration of "conceptual pacts," or partner-specific agreements on how to conceptualize objects. In two experiments, we manipulated lexical entrainment in a referential communication task and measured the effect of this manipulation on epistemic and practical trust.

Taking stock of an idiom's background assumptions: an alternative relevance theoretic account.

This paper begins by presenting the theoretical background of, and the accompanying psycholinguistic findings on, idiom processing. The paper then widens its lens by comparing the idiom processing literature to that of metaphor and irony. We do so partly to better understand the , according to which idiomatic sentences (unlike metaphoric and ironic ones) are generally processed than their literal controls; part of our motivation is to reconcile the differences between idiom processing, on the one hand, and metaphor and irony processing on the other.

Face Management and Negative Strengthening: The Role of Power Relations, Social Distance, and Gender.

Negated gradable adjectives often convey an interpretation that is stronger than their literal meaning, which is referred to as 'negative strengthening.' For example, a sentence like 'John is not kind' may give rise to the inference that . Crucially, negation is more likely to be pragmatically strengthened in the case of positive adjectives ('not kind' to mean ) than negative adjectives ('not mean' to mean ).

Epistemic Trust and the Emergence of Conduct Problems: Aggression in the Service of Communication.

Fonagy and colleagues have recently proposed that deficits in the capacity for epistemic trust (i. e., the expectation that interpersonal communication is relevant to the addressee) are fundamental to psychopathology.

Believing What You're Told: Politeness and Scalar Inferences.

The experimental pragmatics literature has extensively investigated the ways in which distinct contextual factors affect the computation of scalar inferences, whose most studied example is the one that allows "Some -ed" to mean . Recent studies from Bonnefon et al. (2009, 2011) investigate the effect of politeness on the interpretation of scalar utterances.