Luca Bischetti

University School for Advanced Studies IUSS Pavia · Center for Neurocognition and Theoretical Syntax

Healthcare services require rapid assessment tools, as well as the possibility of using them flexibly in different contexts, such as those experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, that favor remote interaction over traditional care. These needs become especially challenging when assessing language and communication skills, for which few tools exis...

Theoretical pragmatics in the post-Gricean tradition argued that metaphor requires understanding of how another person sees the world. Yet, it is unclear what role mindreading plays in developing metaphor skills. Here we examined the relationship between metaphor and Theory of Mind (ToM) in middle childhood by using two different tasks. In addition...

Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in interactional humour from social and pragmatic perspectives, with fascinating results. Released more than a decade later than Norrick and Chiaro (2009) Humor in Interaction, The Pragmatics of Humour in Interactive Contexts gathers some of the most recent work on humour in interaction, with contributio...

Healthcare services require rapid assessment tools, as well as the possibility of using them flexibly in different contexts, such as those experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, that favor remote interaction over traditional care. These needs become especially challenging when assessing language and communication skills, for which few tools exis...

Previous works highlighted the relevance of automated language analysis for predicting diagnosis in schizophrenia, but a deeper language-based data-driven investigation of the clinical heterogeneity through the illness course has been generally neglected. Here we used a semiautomated multidimensional linguistic analysis innovatively combined with a...

Book chapter to be included in "Handbook of Clinical Linguistics" (2nd ed.), Martin J. Ball, Nicole Müller & Liz Spencer (Eds.), Wiley.

Whether Theory of Mind (ToM) contributes to metaphor understanding has been largely investigated in language acquisition and decay. Yet we know very little about the role of ToM in real-time processing of metaphors in neurotypical adults. Here, we tested the relationship between ToM and metaphor through Event Related Potentials (ERPs) by capitalizi...

Pragmatics lies at the point where language meets the social world and encompasses both the linguistic and the social dimensions of communication. However, the relationship between pragmatic abilities, other language skills, and socio-cognitive aspects such as mentalizing is still a matter of wide debate. This study sets out to investigate the stat...

Introduction: Language and communication disruptions in schizophrenia are at the center of a large body of investigation. Yet, the remediation of such disruptions is still in its infancy. Here we targeted what is known to be one of the most damaged language domains in schizophrenia, namely pragmatics, by conducting a pragmatics-centered interventio...

Language disorders are a core symptom of schizophrenia. Currently, computational approaches, which provide possibly quick and fine-grained quantitative linguistic analyses, represent a promising tool for research on language disturbances, with potential clinical impact. Previous studies using automated methods for linguistic analysis have mainly fo...

We often see an upsurge of humor inspired by tragic circumstances: this happened also during the Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) outbreak. However, little is known about the emotional response to tragedy-triggered humor, let alone Covid-19 humor. With a large-scale survey completed during the early stages of Italy's lockdown, we studied the app...

We still know very little about the longitudinal relationships between Theory of Mind (ToM) and metaphor understanding in typically developing children. We examined this issue by using a short-term longitudinal design, and by distinguishing between metaphor accuracy (the ability to understand metaphors) and specificity of mental interpretation (the...

Background Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) was traditionally described as a disease restricted to the motor system. However, recent findings suggested that it also affects cognition, especially executive functions, social cognition, language and pragmatics. A relevant issue in current research is thus the description of the cognitive phenotype...

Introduction. Schizophrenia (SCZ) is a chronic disabling mental disorder affecting 24 million people worldwide and causing a high burden of suffering. The deficit of pragmatic abilities is a significant feature of SCZ, affecting around 70% of patients, and it is a main determinant of functional disability, undermining patients’ social well-being an...

Jokes understanding is an important part of people's social life, especially in aging. However, little is known about older adults' humor understanding and the role of the cognitive skills underpinning social communication, mainly pragmatics and theory of mind (ToM). To fill this gap, we created the Phonological and Mental Jokes (PMJ) task, a fine-...

We investigated the association between individual differences in metaphor understanding and Theory of Mind (ToM) in typically developing children. We distinguished between two types of metaphors and created a Physical and Mental Metaphors task, echoing a similar distinction for ToM. Nine-year-olds scored lower than older age-groups in ToM as well...

We studied the electrophysiological correlates of verbal humor comprehension by comparing Event Related Potentials (ERPs) and time-frequency representations recorded while 50 participants read humorous and nonhumorous passages. Using linear mixed models on single trials we showed that humorous target words elicited a larger Left Anterior Negativity...