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Mazzarella, Diana

Nom
Mazzarella, Diana
Affiliation principale
Site web
Fonction
Professeur.e ordinaire
Email
diana.mazzarella@unine.ch
Identifiants
https://libra.unine.ch/handle/123456789/1203
_
0000-0002-7650-7196

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  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Does Lexical Coordination Affect Epistemic and Practical Trust? The Role of Conceptual Pacts.
    (2024-01-01T00:00:00Z)
    Pozzi, Mélinda 
    ;
    Bangerter, Adrian 
    ;
    Mazzarella, Diana 
    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. Our results showed that participants were more likely to trust a coordinated partner than an uncoordinated one, but only when the latter broke previously established conceptual pacts.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Ironic speakers, vigilant hearers
    (2023-04-04)
    Mazzarella, Diana 
    ;
    Nausicaa Pouscoulous
    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 role of epistemic vigilance in irony understanding and suggest that it relies on the exercise of first- and second-order vigilance towards the content, the ironic speaker as well as the source of the irony.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Pragmatic inference, levels of meaning and speaker accountability
    (2023-1-18)
    Alison, Hall
    ;
    Mazzarella, Diana 
    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 as a premise for the derivation of further implicit meanings - ‘implicatures’. This paper experimentally explores the relationship between speaker accountability and levels of meaning. Our findings demonstrate that speakers are held more accountable, and thus suffer greater reputational costs, when they explicitly communicate a piece of false information than when they do it implicitly, independently of whether or not there is pragmatic enrichment involved at the level of the ‘explicated content’ (Study 1). Furthermore, our findings show that, in deceptive contexts, the kind of pragmatic enrichment at issue does affect speaker accountability: when the deceptive content is inferred via completion, speakers are held more accountable for what they explicitly communicate than when it is inferred via expansion (Study 2). These results provide the first empirical evidence in favour of the relevance of the distinction between completion and expansion to liability judgements in cases of dishonest communication.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Il rompicapo della fiducia infantile. Tra psicologia dello sviluppo e pragmatica della comunicazione
    (2022-08-01)
    Mazzarella, Diana 
    ;
    Edoardo Vaccargiu
    Communication is a powerful tool for acquiring novel information. However, belief acquisition via testimony must be buttressed by trust. How does trust develop throughout ontogeny? Which are the cognitive underpinnings of children’s trust towards communication? In this paper, we address these questions by focusing on some controversial data coming from the existing literature in developmental psychology. Specifically, we outline the so-called puzzle of child trust: while children up to the age of four appear to be oblivious to the risk of deception, there is robust evidence for precocious mechanisms of epistemic vigilance in infancy. We address this puzzle by combining a social and a cognitive perspective. Here, we suggest that children’s apparent gullibility is the result of robust expectations of trustworthiness, calibrated to the experience with benevolent caregivers and triggered by the cognitive underpinnings of the interpretation of communicative acts.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    “I didn't mean to suggest anything like that!”:Deniability and context reconstruction
    (2021-10-5)
    Mazzarella, Diana 
    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 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 speaker's utterance and I illustrate how considerations of cognitive utility are the key determinant for distinguishing plausible from merely possible deniability.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Pragmatics and mind reading: The puzzle of autism
    (2021-9-30)
    Mazzarella, Diana 
    ;
    Noveck, Ira
    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 cautious approach based on both theoretical and empirical arguments. Theoretically speaking, data from autism are compatible with the view that language interpretation is the result of a special-purpose form of mind reading, dedicated to the domain of intentional communication. Empirically speaking, the data are neither clear nor consistent enough for making strong claims about what exactly are the communicative challenges of highly verbal autistic individuals.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Face Management and Negative Strengthening: The Role of Power Relations, Social Distance, and Gender
    (2021-9-27)
    Gotzner, Nicole
    ;
    Mazzarella, Diana 
    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 John is rather mean. Crucially, negation is more likely to be pragmatically strengthened in the case of positive adjectives (‘not kind’ to mean rather mean) than negative adjectives (‘not mean’ to mean rather kind). A classical explanation of this polarity asymmetry is based on politeness, specifically on the potential face threat of bare negative adjectives (Horn, 1989; Brown and Levinson, 1987). This paper presents the results of two experiments investigating the role of face management in negative strengthening. We show that negative strengthening of positive and negative adjectives interacts differently with the social variables of power, social distance, and gender.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Epistemic Trust and the Emergence of Conduct Problems: Aggression in the Service of Communication
    (2021-9-23)
    Talia, Alessandro
    ;
    Duschinsky, Robbie
    ;
    Mazzarella, Diana 
    ;
    Hauschild, Sophie
    ;
    Taubner, Svenja