ABSTRACT
This chapter considers critical issues of experimental pragmatics through three main themes: (a) conversational implicature, (b) utterance interpretation and mind-reading, and (c) development and disorders of pragmatic abilities. It touches upon historical perspectives of experimental pragmatics and illustrates how they link to current approaches and research. Main research methods used in experimental pragmatics such as reaction time, reading time, eye-tracking, as well as neuropsychological approaches using functional MRI and electroencephalography are discussed. Overall, the chapter illustrates that experimental approaches are effective to investigate cognitive and social factors required for the successful generation of pragmatic inferences and to examine how/when they are used in the actual interpretation of utterances. This chapter also demonstrates that experimental methods are very fruitful to investigate the development and disorders of pragmatic abilities.
