Mentalizing during communicative acts

Successful communication often requires people to account for one another’s mental states. Previous research has focused primarily on how this is achieved between speakers and listeners; in contrast, the issue of how listeners account for another listener’s mental state has not been investigated thoroughly. In my thesis, I report a series of studies that seek to address this gap in the literature. Across four empirical studies, I investigate: a) the neural processes involved in tracking another listener’s comprehension, b) the importance of task and situational demands on social language comprehension, and c) the relationship between levels of processing and social language comprehension. The results of these investigations provide insight into both the behaviour and the neurocognitive processes supporting the behaviour of co-listeners. Specifically, my results suggest that both mentalizing and simulation are important mechanisms allowing us to achieve insight into the comprehension of other listeners. Importantly, we do not automatically track everything about the experience of other listeners: low level features of language are not processed from another listener’s perspective. In addition, the task demands and situational constraints in which co-listeners find themselves heavily influences whether or not perspectives will be shared. Taken together, the findings discussed in this work contribute to new models of language comprehension in social contexts.