El procesamiento oral de lo que no se dice (pero se comunica)

Abstract

The present article is part of a broader research in the area of oral discourse comprehension. Based on foundational theories in cognitive psychology (e.g. Anderson’s Adaptive Control of Thought; or act); text processing (e.g. Van Dijk; 1994; and Van Dijk & Kintsch; 1983); and cognitive pragmatic theories (e.g. Sperber & Wilson’s Relevance Theory); I develop a model of cognitive processing that accounts for the way in which listeners understand non literal meaning in oral discourse; and build hypothesis through inferential processes. Some methodological principles are construed on the basis of such model; which are used to present a pedagogical proposal aimed at optimizing the pragmatic competence in intermediate learners of foreign/ second languages who; in spite of their linguistic proficiency; still lack knowledge of some pragmatic aspects of the language.