Nausicaa Pouscoulous
List of John Benjamins publications in which Nausicaa Pouscoulous is involved.
2026 Children’s vigilance towards others’ gullibility Investigating Children’s Irony Comprehension: Current trends, challenges, and perspectives, Fuchs-Kreiß, Julia (ed.), pp. 208–228 | Article
Humans are endowed with a suite of cognitive mechanisms that enable them to mitigate the risk of misinformation and underlie their epistemic vigilance. When direct access to the initial source of information is unavailable, individuals often rely on the vigilance of others to acquire beliefs.… read more
2026 Conventionality in irony development: Help or hinder? Investigating Children’s Irony Comprehension: Current trends, challenges, and perspectives, Fuchs-Kreiß, Julia (ed.), pp. 121–139 | Article
Unlike other figurative language abilities, irony emerges rather late, and its mastering takes place over a protracted window of development. Whilst its late emergence reflects the later development of prerequisite skills, its protracted development is likely to reflect the fact that some… read more
2026 Kidding kids: The role of epistemic vigilance in irony development Investigating Children’s Irony Comprehension: Current trends, challenges, and perspectives, Fuchs-Kreiß, Julia (ed.), pp. 99–120 | Article
Young children are notoriously bad at understanding ironical statements, with irony comprehension emerging around the age of 6 and appearing resistant to task manipulation. What can explain this late emergence? We propose that children’s epistemic vigilance is a pivotal component of the… read more
2014 “The elevator’s buttocks”: Metaphorical abilities in children Pragmatic Development in First Language Acquisition, Matthews, Danielle (ed.), pp. 239–260 | Article
Classic studies suggest that metaphor production and comprehension are relatively late developing pragmatic skills, although it is not quite clear why this should be so. This chapter will first provide a sketch of the theoretical and adult processing accounts of metaphor before presenting an… read more
2011 Metaphor: For adults only? Cognitive and Empirical Pragmatics: Issues and perspectives, Bochner, Gregory, Philippe De Brabanter, Mikhail Kissine and Daniela Rossi (eds.), pp. 51–79 | Article
Many experimental studies from the 70s and 80s show that children do not understand metaphors until fairly late in development (not until adolescence, some claim). I will argue that children’s metaphorical abilities may not be as weak as they first appear. Findings suggesting a poor comprehension… read more