Preschoolers’ Sensitivity to the Infringement of Conversational Maxims in View of Mentalization

The present chapter aims to clarify the existing associations between social cognitive skills and a productive pragmatic competence enabling the smooth coordination of discourse. It investigates if preschoolers have a sensitivity to the infringement of the Gricean conversational maxims (Maxim of Quantity, Quality, Manner and Relevance), and if their social-cognitive skills influence their success in the recognition of the infringements. Eventually the study reveals the entire trajectory of the levels of mentalization and the correspondence of these levels to the levels of pragmatic complexity, in a pyramid, that encapsulates the entire series of experimental pragmatic investigations by the author on the relationship between mentalization and metaphor (Schnell in Acta Linguistica 54–1:73–104, 2007), irony and humor comprehension (Schnell in Hungarian Humour. Humor and Culture. Tertium Society, 2012; Schnell and Varga in Hungarian humour. Humor and culture 3. Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies, 2012) and the recognition of Maxim infringements (2019). Finally, the findings in the maxim tasks are integrated into the matrix capturing all these levels of pragmatic competence, yielding a trajectory of social-cognitive development and the corresponding levels of pragmatic complexity. Conclusions drawn concerning the Maxim of Relevance being a super-maxim, and findings are embedded in contemporary research in cognitive development and pragmatics.