Beyond stereotypes: Cognitive abilities underlying social meaning

‘Social meaning’ refers to a relation between social identity and linguistic features, and often concerns stereotypical knowledge. In this study, we propose this relation can also be mediated by cognitive abilities, as these are affected by social context and are required in meaning processing. As a case-study, we tested the negative effects of social outgroup (through political affiliation) and Theory of Mind skills (ToM) on the processing of a highly-regularized pragmatic phenomenon (scalar implicatures) in Hebrew and English speakers. First, we replicated previous findings showing a decrease in the rates of pragmatic responses for an outgroup speaker compared to a control speaker with no group affiliation. More importantly, we showed that this effect is associated with ToM abilities, such that individuals with lower baseline ToM abilities in the outgroup condition were less likely to give pragmatic responses than individuals with similar ToM abilities in the control condition. This suggests a role for ToM in mediating the negative effect in the outgroup condition, therefore supporting the expansion of social meaning to more general, non-stereotype-specific, cases where social characteristics affect pragmatic interpretation, through the mediation of social cognition abilities. Our results highlight that social meaning is ingrained in pragmatic processing.