Diana Mazzarella
Biographic Data
| ID | 799310 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Diana Mazzarella |
| GIVEN NAMES | Diana |
| FAMILY NAME | Mazzarella |
| SIGNATURE | MAZZARELLA D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Neuchâtel |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7650-7196 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 41 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Modulating Politeness in Criticism and Responses to Criticism: A Qualitative Study in French
We present results from a qualitative analysis illustrating how people handle criticism in a workplace environment, including both the production of and responses to criticism. Our data comes from responses provided by 80 participants in a written Discourse Completion Task (DCT) in French. In the scenarios, relative power (equal vs. hierarchical) and social distance (close vs. distant) were manipulated. Our analysis focuses on three recurrent pat…
Redescribing early pragmatics
Developmental work on ostensive communication calls for reconsidering existing theoretical accounts within a comprehensive framework of early pragmatics and its development. In this paper, we propose a new perspective on the ontogeny and development of ostensive communication as underpinned by a process of knowledge and representational redescription. By discussing relevant empirical data, we ground early pragmatics on in‐built principles of impl…
Trusting the vigilant: How children value others' vigilance against deception
Humans rely extensively on communicated information, yet communication exposes receivers to the risk of misinformation. To manage this risk, individuals must not only be vigilant against dishonest informants but also monitor others' vigilance towards deception, especially when information is transmitted across social chains. The present study investigates children's vigilance towards dishonesty ('first-order vigilance'), as well as their ability …
The Developmental Puzzle of Irony Understanding: Is Epistemic Vigilance the Missing Piece
The prolonged developmental window of irony understanding opens up the question of which socio-cognitive repertoire underlies this pragmatic capacity. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between epistemic vigilance and irony understanding in 5/6- and 6/7-year-old children using a picture selection task. We assessed children’s vigilance towards unreliable informants and manipulated the reliability of the irony target. Our findin…
Irony Comprehension: Pragmatics Meets Epistemic Vigilance
The present study experimentally investigates the role of epistemic vigilance in children’s comprehension of verbal irony. We tested 186 children aged from 4/5 to 7/8 using an offline irony comprehension task and an epistemic vigilance task. In the vigilance task, we assessed children’s tendency to trust reliable informants and mistrust unreliable ones. The same informants appeared in the irony task as the target of the ironical remarks, allowing…
Children’s vigilance towards others’ gullibility
Humans are endowed with a suite of cognitive mechanisms that enable them to mitigate the risk of misinformation and underlie their epistemic vigilance. When direct access to the initial source of information is unavailable, individuals often rely on the vigilance of others to acquire beliefs. Moreover, monitoring the critical alertness of one’s interlocutors is essential for interpreting their communicative intentions, particularly in cases of de…
Kidding kids: The role of epistemic vigilance in irony development
Young children are notoriously bad at understanding ironical statements, with irony comprehension emerging around the age of 6 and appearing resistant to task manipulation. What can explain this late emergence? We propose that children’s epistemic vigilance is a pivotal component of the constellation of socio-cognitive abilities underpinning irony comprehension. Epistemic vigilance enables children to detect the contextual incongruity of an ironi…
Attitude understanding and irony development: Methodological challenges
A distinctive feature of verbal irony is the expression of a dissociative attitude. Although attitude understanding represents a key element of irony comprehension and its development, the experimental research in this area remains fragmented and often yields mixed findings. This paper reviews the measures employed to target distinct aspects of irony understanding, including attitude recognition, and examines inconsistencies in their application.…
Are presuppositions really misleading? Assessing the impact of linguistic encoding, at‐issueness, and source reliability on epistemic vigilance
Presuppositions bypass epistemic vigilance, but it is unclear if this stems from their encoding or their not‐at‐issue status. In a truth‐value judgment task, participants evaluated false statements from a suspect (low reliability) or a witness (high reliability), varying in linguistic encoding (presupposition vs. assertion) and at‐issueness (at‐issue vs. not‐at‐issue). False information was detected faster and more accurately when at‐issue. False…
Troubles-talk: How do we criticize and reply to criticisms in French? An experimental investigation
In everyday communication, criticisms are important and commonly occurring face-threatening acts. In this paper, we investigate the way people deal with criticisms by conducting two experiments in French involving the production of, and response to, criticisms using a written Discourse Completion Test. In each experiment, we presented participants with scenarios in which we manipulated power relations (equal vs. hierarchical) and horizontal socia…
Negative strengthening: The interplay of evaluative polarity and scale structure
This work investigates absolute adjectives in the not very construction and how their pragmatic interpretation depends on the evaluative polarity and the scale structure of their antonymic pairs. Our experimental study reveals that evaluatively positive adjectives (clean) are more likely to be strengthened than evaluatively negative ones (dirty), and that maximum standard adjectives (clean or closed) are more likely to be strengthened than minimu…
Speaker trustworthiness: Shall confidence match evidence
Overconfidence is typically damaging to one’s reputation as a trustworthy source of information. Previous research shows that the reputational cost associated with conveying a piece of false information is higher for confident than unconfident speakers. When judging speaker trustworthiness, individuals do not exclusively rely on past accuracy but consider the extent to which speakers expressed a degree of confidence that matched the accuracy of t…
Communication: Inferring speaker intentions or perceiving the world? Insights from developmental research
Communication is an effective and rich tool to transmit information to others. Different models of communication, though, disagree on how beliefs are acquired via testimony. While the Intentional-Inferential Model conceives communication as a matter of expressing, recognizing and evaluating intentions, the Direct Perception Model views communication as a means for direct belief transfer. What kind of experimental data can be brought to bear on th…
“I didn't mean to suggest anything like that!”: Deniability and context reconstruction
Verbal communication leaves room for interpretative disputes. Speakers can argue about what they mean by their words and negotiate their commitments in conversation. This article examines the deniability of implicitly communicated contents and addresses the question of what makes an act of denial seem more or less plausible to the addressee. I argue that denials bring about a process of reconstruction of the context of interpretation of the speak…
Verbal irony and the implicitness of the echo: The processing of young and older adults
Speakers can express a critical, dissociative attitude by being ironic. According to the Echoic account of verbal irony, this attitude targets a proposition that echoes a thought attributed to someone other than the speaker herself at the present time. This study investigated the role of echo in irony processing across the lifespan. Through a self-paced reading task, we assessed whether the degree of explicitness of the proposition echoed by the …
Ironic speakers, vigilant hearers
Verbal irony characteristically involves the expression of a derogatory, dissociative attitude. The ironical speaker is not only stating a blatant falsehood or irrelevant proposition; she is also communicating her stance towards its epistemic status. The centrality of attitude recognition in irony understanding opens up the question of which cognitive abilities make it possible. Drawing on Wilson (2009), we provide a full-fledged account of the r…
Pragmatic inference, levels of meaning and speaker accountability
Are speakers held more accountable for what they explicitly communicate than for what they implicate? Speakers typically communicate more than they linguistically encode, thus leaving to addressees the task of inferring what they intend to communicate. As a result, the linguistically decoded meaning is pragmatically enriched to arrive at what the speaker says (or directly communicates) - the 'explicated content' of the utterance - which can serve…
The polarity asymmetry of negative strengthening: Dissociating adjectival polarity from facethreatening potential
The interpretation of negated antonyms is characterised by a polarity asymmetry: the negation of a positive polarity antonym (X is not interesting) is more likely to be strengthened to convey its opposite (‘X is uninteresting’) than the negation of a negative polarity antonym (X is not uninteresting to convey that ‘X is interesting’) is. A classical explanation of this asymmetry relies on face-management. Since the predication of a negative polar…
Pragmatics and epistemic vigilance: A developmental perspective
Any form of overt communication, be it gestural or linguistic, involves pragmatic skills. This article investigates the social–cognitive foundations of pragmatic development from infancy to late childhood and argues that it is driven by, among other things, the emergence of the capacities to assess the communicator's competence (e.g. perceptual access, epistemic states) and honesty . We discuss the implications of this proposal and show how it sh…
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. In this paper, we consider the implications of this hypothesis for understanding the role of aggression in conduct disorder and conduct problems more generally. Our main proposal is to view conduct problems not only as reflecting dy…
Pragmatics and mind reading: The puzzle of autism (Response to Kissine)
Mikhail Kissine's (2021) target article examines autism in order to mine questions about language use and its cognitive underpinnings. Among these, we focus on the question concerning the role of mind reading in language interpretation. Kissine claims that the selective pragmatic profile of highly verbal autistic individuals undermines the existence of an ‘intrinsic link’ between language interpretation and mind reading. We advocate for a more ca…
Presuppositional effects and ostensive-inferential communication
Saying, presupposing and implicating: How pragmatics modulates commitment
Politeness, relevance and scalar inferences
Saying, presupposing and implicating: How pragmatics modulates commitment
Politeness, relevance and scalar inferences
Pragmatic inference, levels of meaning and speaker accountability
Are speakers held more accountable for what they explicitly communicate than for what they implicate? Speakers typically communicate more than they linguistically encode, thus leaving to addressees the task of inferring what they intend to communicate. As a result, the linguistically decoded meaning is pragmatically enriched to arrive at what the speaker says (or directly communicates) - the 'explicated content' of the utterance - which can serve…
Ironic speakers, vigilant hearers
Verbal irony characteristically involves the expression of a derogatory, dissociative attitude. The ironical speaker is not only stating a blatant falsehood or irrelevant proposition; she is also communicating her stance towards its epistemic status. The centrality of attitude recognition in irony understanding opens up the question of which cognitive abilities make it possible. Drawing on Wilson (2009), we provide a full-fledged account of the r…
Pragmatics and mind reading: The puzzle of autism (Response to Kissine)
Mikhail Kissine's (2021) target article examines autism in order to mine questions about language use and its cognitive underpinnings. Among these, we focus on the question concerning the role of mind reading in language interpretation. Kissine claims that the selective pragmatic profile of highly verbal autistic individuals undermines the existence of an ‘intrinsic link’ between language interpretation and mind reading. We advocate for a more ca…
Politeness, relevance and scalar inferences
Presuppositional effects and ostensive-inferential communication
Saying, presupposing and implicating: How pragmatics modulates commitment
The polarity asymmetry of negative strengthening: Dissociating adjectival polarity from facethreatening potential
The interpretation of negated antonyms is characterised by a polarity asymmetry: the negation of a positive polarity antonym (X is not interesting) is more likely to be strengthened to convey its opposite (‘X is uninteresting’) than the negation of a negative polarity antonym (X is not uninteresting to convey that ‘X is interesting’) is. A classical explanation of this asymmetry relies on face-management. Since the predication of a negative polar…
Pragmatics and epistemic vigilance: A developmental perspective
Any form of overt communication, be it gestural or linguistic, involves pragmatic skills. This article investigates the social–cognitive foundations of pragmatic development from infancy to late childhood and argues that it is driven by, among other things, the emergence of the capacities to assess the communicator's competence (e.g. perceptual access, epistemic states) and honesty . We discuss the implications of this proposal and show how it sh…
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. In this paper, we consider the implications of this hypothesis for understanding the role of aggression in conduct disorder and conduct problems more generally. Our main proposal is to view conduct problems not only as reflecting dy…
Pragmatics and mind reading: The puzzle of autism (Response to Kissine)
Mikhail Kissine's (2021) target article examines autism in order to mine questions about language use and its cognitive underpinnings. Among these, we focus on the question concerning the role of mind reading in language interpretation. Kissine claims that the selective pragmatic profile of highly verbal autistic individuals undermines the existence of an ‘intrinsic link’ between language interpretation and mind reading. We advocate for a more ca…
“I didn't mean to suggest anything like that!”: Deniability and context reconstruction
Verbal communication leaves room for interpretative disputes. Speakers can argue about what they mean by their words and negotiate their commitments in conversation. This article examines the deniability of implicitly communicated contents and addresses the question of what makes an act of denial seem more or less plausible to the addressee. I argue that denials bring about a process of reconstruction of the context of interpretation of the speak…
Verbal irony and the implicitness of the echo: The processing of young and older adults
Speakers can express a critical, dissociative attitude by being ironic. According to the Echoic account of verbal irony, this attitude targets a proposition that echoes a thought attributed to someone other than the speaker herself at the present time. This study investigated the role of echo in irony processing across the lifespan. Through a self-paced reading task, we assessed whether the degree of explicitness of the proposition echoed by the …
Ironic speakers, vigilant hearers
Verbal irony characteristically involves the expression of a derogatory, dissociative attitude. The ironical speaker is not only stating a blatant falsehood or irrelevant proposition; she is also communicating her stance towards its epistemic status. The centrality of attitude recognition in irony understanding opens up the question of which cognitive abilities make it possible. Drawing on Wilson (2009), we provide a full-fledged account of the r…
Pragmatic inference, levels of meaning and speaker accountability
Are speakers held more accountable for what they explicitly communicate than for what they implicate? Speakers typically communicate more than they linguistically encode, thus leaving to addressees the task of inferring what they intend to communicate. As a result, the linguistically decoded meaning is pragmatically enriched to arrive at what the speaker says (or directly communicates) - the 'explicated content' of the utterance - which can serve…
Negative strengthening: The interplay of evaluative polarity and scale structure
This work investigates absolute adjectives in the not very construction and how their pragmatic interpretation depends on the evaluative polarity and the scale structure of their antonymic pairs. Our experimental study reveals that evaluatively positive adjectives (clean) are more likely to be strengthened than evaluatively negative ones (dirty), and that maximum standard adjectives (clean or closed) are more likely to be strengthened than minimu…
Speaker trustworthiness: Shall confidence match evidence
Overconfidence is typically damaging to one’s reputation as a trustworthy source of information. Previous research shows that the reputational cost associated with conveying a piece of false information is higher for confident than unconfident speakers. When judging speaker trustworthiness, individuals do not exclusively rely on past accuracy but consider the extent to which speakers expressed a degree of confidence that matched the accuracy of t…
Communication: Inferring speaker intentions or perceiving the world? Insights from developmental research
Communication is an effective and rich tool to transmit information to others. Different models of communication, though, disagree on how beliefs are acquired via testimony. While the Intentional-Inferential Model conceives communication as a matter of expressing, recognizing and evaluating intentions, the Direct Perception Model views communication as a means for direct belief transfer. What kind of experimental data can be brought to bear on th…
Are presuppositions really misleading? Assessing the impact of linguistic encoding, at‐issueness, and source reliability on epistemic vigilance
Presuppositions bypass epistemic vigilance, but it is unclear if this stems from their encoding or their not‐at‐issue status. In a truth‐value judgment task, participants evaluated false statements from a suspect (low reliability) or a witness (high reliability), varying in linguistic encoding (presupposition vs. assertion) and at‐issueness (at‐issue vs. not‐at‐issue). False information was detected faster and more accurately when at‐issue. False…
Troubles-talk: How do we criticize and reply to criticisms in French? An experimental investigation
In everyday communication, criticisms are important and commonly occurring face-threatening acts. In this paper, we investigate the way people deal with criticisms by conducting two experiments in French involving the production of, and response to, criticisms using a written Discourse Completion Test. In each experiment, we presented participants with scenarios in which we manipulated power relations (equal vs. hierarchical) and horizontal socia…
Modulating Politeness in Criticism and Responses to Criticism: A Qualitative Study in French
We present results from a qualitative analysis illustrating how people handle criticism in a workplace environment, including both the production of and responses to criticism. Our data comes from responses provided by 80 participants in a written Discourse Completion Task (DCT) in French. In the scenarios, relative power (equal vs. hierarchical) and social distance (close vs. distant) were manipulated. Our analysis focuses on three recurrent pat…
Redescribing early pragmatics
Developmental work on ostensive communication calls for reconsidering existing theoretical accounts within a comprehensive framework of early pragmatics and its development. In this paper, we propose a new perspective on the ontogeny and development of ostensive communication as underpinned by a process of knowledge and representational redescription. By discussing relevant empirical data, we ground early pragmatics on in‐built principles of impl…
Trusting the vigilant: How children value others' vigilance against deception
Humans rely extensively on communicated information, yet communication exposes receivers to the risk of misinformation. To manage this risk, individuals must not only be vigilant against dishonest informants but also monitor others' vigilance towards deception, especially when information is transmitted across social chains. The present study investigates children's vigilance towards dishonesty ('first-order vigilance'), as well as their ability …
The Developmental Puzzle of Irony Understanding: Is Epistemic Vigilance the Missing Piece
The prolonged developmental window of irony understanding opens up the question of which socio-cognitive repertoire underlies this pragmatic capacity. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between epistemic vigilance and irony understanding in 5/6- and 6/7-year-old children using a picture selection task. We assessed children’s vigilance towards unreliable informants and manipulated the reliability of the irony target. Our findin…
Irony Comprehension: Pragmatics Meets Epistemic Vigilance
The present study experimentally investigates the role of epistemic vigilance in children’s comprehension of verbal irony. We tested 186 children aged from 4/5 to 7/8 using an offline irony comprehension task and an epistemic vigilance task. In the vigilance task, we assessed children’s tendency to trust reliable informants and mistrust unreliable ones. The same informants appeared in the irony task as the target of the ironical remarks, allowing…
Children’s vigilance towards others’ gullibility
Humans are endowed with a suite of cognitive mechanisms that enable them to mitigate the risk of misinformation and underlie their epistemic vigilance. When direct access to the initial source of information is unavailable, individuals often rely on the vigilance of others to acquire beliefs. Moreover, monitoring the critical alertness of one’s interlocutors is essential for interpreting their communicative intentions, particularly in cases of de…
Kidding kids: The role of epistemic vigilance in irony development
Young children are notoriously bad at understanding ironical statements, with irony comprehension emerging around the age of 6 and appearing resistant to task manipulation. What can explain this late emergence? We propose that children’s epistemic vigilance is a pivotal component of the constellation of socio-cognitive abilities underpinning irony comprehension. Epistemic vigilance enables children to detect the contextual incongruity of an ironi…
Attitude understanding and irony development: Methodological challenges
A distinctive feature of verbal irony is the expression of a dissociative attitude. Although attitude understanding represents a key element of irony comprehension and its development, the experimental research in this area remains fragmented and often yields mixed findings. This paper reviews the measures employed to target distinct aspects of irony understanding, including attitude recognition, and examines inconsistencies in their application.…
Psychology (16 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (15 works) · Linguistics (13 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Cognitive psychology (8 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (8 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (7 works) · Cognition (7 works) · Irony (7 works)