Bálint Forgács

Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, Cognitive psychology, Faculty Member

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I am an Assistant Professor at the Cognitive Psychology Department of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), working in the ELTE Babylab. I am a PI of a Young Researcher Grant of the NKFIH (OTKA), and the manager of the infant EEG lab. I am interested in the the interaction between mentalization (Theory of Mind) and early language abilities of babies, especially the communicative and pragmatic skills in infancy.
Supervisors: Judit Gervain, PhD, Professor György Gergely, Professor Csaba Pléh, Professor Arthur M. Jacobs, Professor Marta Kutas, and Professor Ildikó Király

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Meaning as mentalization

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2024

The way we establish meaning has been a profound question not only in language research but in de... more 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 informationtransmitting 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 codebased 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.

format_quoteLinguistic meaning relies fundamentally on attributing intentions, rejecting traditional decoding approaches and advocating for mentalization-driven comprehension.format_quote

Bálint Forgács

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