This chapter focuses on rapid automatic naming (RAN) as a key cognitive process involved in reading and a frequent area of weakness in individuals with dyslexia. RAN tasks require individuals to quickly name a series of familiar items (e.g. colours, numbers, letters, objects), engaging multiple cognitive systems including visual recognition, phonological retrieval, and processing speed. The authors explain that slow naming speed is not just a surface-level problem but reflects deeper inefficiencies in how the brain accesses and retrieves stored verbal information. Deficits in RAN are shown to correlate strongly with reading fluency and word retrieval challenges. The chapter discusses how RAN measures, particularly when used alongside phonological-processing assessments, can improve the accuracy of dyslexia diagnoses – supporting the ’double-deficit hypothesis’ that suggests that both phonological and naming-speed deficits can contribute to reading impairment. Unlike phonological awareness, RAN is less amenable to direct intervention but remains diagnostically valuable. The authors argue for its inclusion in comprehensive assessments and emphasise its role in revealing broader processing inefficiencies that extend beyond reading. Overall, RAN is presented as a sensitive cognitive marker of dyslexia that contributes meaningfully to understanding variability in reading development and fluency.

The chapter focuses on the interpretation of a group of expressions which the authors Axel Barceló and Robert Stainton term ‘quasi-factives’, an area in which the recurring issue of the relative contributions of linguistically encoded meaning and pragmatic inference is especially striking. In line with Deirdre Wilson’s early work on presupposition (Wilson 1975), they argue that the factive conclusions which these expressions seem to support are not to be explained semantically. Rather, they are components of the speaker’s meaning and their derivation by the addressee depends on the kind of cost–benefit trade-off that is central to relevance theory.

Nicholas Allott considers how relevance theory can be seen as responding to doubts about the possibility of any kind of systematic pragmatic theory. He considers three sceptical positions: Fodor’s argument that pragmatic processes are not amenable to scientific study because they are unencapsulated (highly context-sensitive), Chomsky’s claim that human intentional action is a mystery rather than a scientifically tractable problem, and a third view which maintains that intentional communication is too complex for systematic study. Allott argues that work in relevance theory can be seen as successfully challenging these sceptical views and he gives concrete examples of its achievements.