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Abstract：
The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in developmental science as well. The relation between linguistic form and content has been loosened up in recent pragmatic approaches to communication, showing that code-based models of language comprehension must be augmented by context-sensitive, pragmatic-inferential mechanisms to recover the speaker\'s intended meaning. Language acquisition has traditionally been thought to involve building a mental lexicon and extracting syntactic rules from noisy linguistic input, while communicative-pragmatic inferences have also been argued to be indispensable. Recent research findings exploring the electrophysiological indicator of semantic processing, the N400, have raised serious questions about the traditional separation between semantic decoding and pragmatic inferential processes. The N400 appears to be sensitive to mentalization-the ability to attribute beliefs to social partners-already from its developmental onset. This finding raises the possibility that mentalization may not simply contribute to pragmatic inferences that enrich linguistic decoding processes but that the semantic system may be functioning in a fundamentally mentalistic manner. The present review first summarizes the key contributions of pragmatic models of communication to language comprehension. Then, it provides an overview of how communicative intentions are interpreted in developmental theories of communication, with a special emphasis on mentalization. Next, it discusses the sensitivity of infants to the information-transmitting potential of language, their ability to pick up its code-like features, and their capacity to track language comprehension of social partners using mentalization. In conclusion, I argue that the recovery of meaning during linguistic communication is not adequately modeled as a process of code-based semantic retrieval complemented by pragmatic inferences. Instead, the semantic system may establish meaning, as intended, during language comprehension and acquisition through mentalistic attribution of content to communicative partners.
摘要：
我们建立意义的方式不仅在语言研究中而且在发展科学中都是一个深刻的问题。在最近的语用交际方法中，语言形式和内容之间的关系已经放松，表明基于代码的语言理解模型必须通过上下文敏感来增强，恢复说话者意图意义的语用推理机制。传统上，语言习得被认为涉及建立心理词典并从嘈杂的语言输入中提取句法规则，而交际-语用推论也被认为是不可或缺的。最近的研究发现探索语义加工的电生理指标，N400提出了关于语义解码和语用推理过程之间传统分离的严重问题。N400似乎从其发展开始就对心智化敏感-将信念归因于社会伙伴的能力。这一发现提出了这样一种可能性，即思维化可能不仅有助于丰富语言解码过程的语用推理，而且语义系统可能以从根本上的思维方式运作。本综述首先总结了语用交际模式对语言理解的主要贡献。然后，它概述了交际意图如何在交际发展理论中被解释，特别强调心智化。接下来,它讨论了婴儿对语言信息传播潜力的敏感性，他们能够获得类似代码的功能，以及他们使用心智化跟踪社会伙伴语言理解的能力。总之,我认为，语言交流过程中意义的恢复并未充分建模为基于代码的语义检索过程，并辅之以语用推理。相反，语义系统可以建立意义，按照预期，在语言理解和习得过程中，通过对交际伙伴的内容进行心理归因。
