ArticleFrontiers in psychology2017
Sincere, Deceitful, and Ironic Communicative Acts and the Role of the Theory of Mind in Childhood.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Is Narrative Enhancement Possible in Healthy Aging? A Preliminary Investigation into the Effects of Advanced Training Activities.Journal of psycholinguistic research · 2026Article
- Does cultural context matter? Comparison of Finnish and Italian children's social-pragmatic comprehension.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Sources of individual variability in a pragmatic reference game: Effects of logical reasoning and Theory of Mind.PloS one · 2026Article
- Neural integration of affective prosodic and semantic cues in non-literal forms of speech understanding.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Affective Theory of Mind and linguistic intimacy in irony production: a developmental perspective.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Pragmatic comprehension and inferential ability: interplay with executive functions and Theory of Mind.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Looking for social pragmatic communication disorder in the complex world of Italian special needs: an exploratory study.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Desires and beliefs: the development of second-order Theory of Mind reasoning in preschoolers and in school-age children.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Can Narrative Skills Improve in Autism Spectrum Disorder? A Preliminary Study with Verbally Fluent Adolescents Receiving the Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment.Journal of psycholinguistic research · 2023Article
- The fuzzy boundaries of the social (pragmatic) communication disorder (SPCD): Why the picture is still so confusing?Heliyon · 2023Review
- The theory of mind and human-robot trust repair.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- An Experimental Study on Sarcasm Comprehension in School Children: The Possible Role of Contextual, Linguistics and Meta-Representative Factors.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- The role of mentalizing capacity and ecological language diversity on irony comprehension in bilingual adults.Memory & cognition · 2023Article
- Irony detection in patients with borderline personality disorder: an experimental study examining schizotypal traits, response biases and empathy.Borderline personality disorder and emotion dysregulation · 2022Article
- Second-Order False Beliefs and Linguistic Recursion in Autism Spectrum Disorder.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2022Article
- Neural-level associations of non-verbal pragmatic comprehension in young Finnish autistic adults.International journal of circumpolar health · 2021Article
- Article
- Multimodal assessment of communicative-pragmatic features in schizophrenia: a machine learning approach.NPJ schizophrenia · 2021Article
- Understanding communicative intentions in schizophrenia using an error analysis approach.NPJ schizophrenia · 2021Article
- The Ability of Patients With Schizophrenia to Comprehend and Produce Sincere, Deceitful, and Ironic Communicative Intentions: The Role of Theory of Mind and Executive Functions.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
The aim of the study is to investigate the relationship among age, first- and second-order Theory of Mind and the increasing ability of children to understand and produce different kinds of communicative acts - sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts - expressed through linguistic and extralinguistic expressive means. To communicate means to modify an interlocutor's mental states (Grice, 1989), and pragmatics studies the inferential processes that are necessary to fill the gap, which often exists in human communication, between the literal meaning of a speaker's utterance and what the speaker intends to communicate to the interlocutor. We administered brief video-clip stories showing different kinds of pragmatic phenomena - sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts - and first- and second-order ToM tasks, to 120 children, ranging in age from 3 to 8 years. The results showed the existence of a trend of difficulty in children's ability to deal with both linguistic and extralinguistic pragmatic tasks, from the simplest to the most difficult: sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative acts. A hierarchical regression analysis indicated that age plays a significant role in explaining children's performance on each pragmatic task. Furthermore, the hierarchical regression analysis revealed that first-order ToM has a causal role in explaining children's performance in handling sincere and deceitful speech acts, but not irony. We did not detect any specific role for second-order ToM. Finally, ToM only partially explains the observed increasing trend of difficulty in children's pragmatic performance: the variance in pragmatic performance explained by ToM increases between sincere and deceitful communicative acts, but not between deceit and irony. The role of inferential ability in explaining the improvement in children's performance across the pragmatic tasks investigated is discussed.
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