ArticleFrontiers in psychology2018
Why Pragmatics and Theory of Mind Do Not (Completely) Overlap.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
38 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- On the inherent yet dynamic link between metaphor and Theory of Mind in middle childhood: meta-analytic evidence from a research programme bridging experimental pragmatics and developmental psychology.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Pooled it
- Is Narrative Enhancement Possible in Healthy Aging? A Preliminary Investigation into the Effects of Advanced Training Activities.Journal of psycholinguistic research · 2026Article
- Cognitive pathways to communicative-pragmatic dysfunction in schizophrenia: The role of autistic symptoms.Schizophrenia research. Cognition · 2026Article
- The Physical and Mental Metaphors (PMM) task and its validation in schizophrenia: A tool for rapid assessment of figurative language comprehension, between pragmatics and symptoms.Schizophrenia research. Cognition · 2026Article
- Enhancing Pragmatic Communication in Healthy Aging: A Preliminary Investigation of the Long-Term Effects of the Advanced Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment.Journal of psycholinguistic research · 2026Article
- The Intriguingly Social N400 of Preverbal Infants.Developmental neurobiology · 2026Article
- Expressive pragmatic language in mood and psychotic disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2026Review
- Disfluencies as a Window into Pragmatic Skills in Russian-Hebrew Bilingual Autistic and Non-Autistic Children.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Article
- Online Metaphor Comprehension in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorders: An Eye Tracking Study.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Article
- Sources of individual variability in a pragmatic reference game: Effects of logical reasoning and Theory of Mind.PloS one · 2026Article
- Neuropragmatics: from classical pragmatics to neurocognitive models of pragmatics in dialogue.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- An assessment of the relation between narrative productivity, subjectivity expression, emotion description, and ToM abilities in healthy aging.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Assessing Theory of Mind in Children: A Tablet-Based Adaptation of a Classic Picture Sequencing Task.Child psychiatry and human development · 2025Article
- 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
- Ten years of using the APACS test: a multistudy cross-diagnostic analysis of pragmatic profiles and their relationship with Theory of Mind.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Re-evaluating Theory of Mind evaluation in large language models.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- 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
- Understanding Theory of Mind-pragmatics relationship through the spectrum of neurodegenerative diseases.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Theory of Mind and the brain substrates of direct and indirect communicative action understanding.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Pragmatics partially segregated from Theory of Mind: evidence from resting-state functional connectivity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Aim of the paper is to discuss the extent to which pragmatics, i.e., the ability to use language and other expressive means to convey meaning in a specific interactional context, overlaps with Theory of Mind (ToM), i.e., the ability to ascribe mental states to oneself and the others. We present empirical data available in the current literature concerning the relation between these two faculties, with specific reference to the developmental and clinical domains. Part of the literature we take into account appears to show that ToM does correlate with pragmatic ability; however, other studies appear to show that pragmatic ability alone cannot explain the empirical differences of performance across different kinds of pragmatic tasks, and therefore that another, at least partially different faculty is required to account for human communication. We argue that to conceive pragmatics as a sort of subcomponent of ToM, and thus to conflate or reduce the notion of pragmatics into the (wider) notion of ToM, is not theoretically correct and a possible cause of methodological confusion in the relevant empirical research. It thus turns out to be necessary that the two faculties be investigated with separate theories as well as different experimental tasks.
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