SLIDE 1 Dark Forces in Language Comprehension
The Case of Neuroticism and Disgust in a Pupillometry Study
Isabell Hubert & Juhani Järvikivi isabell.hubert@ualberta.ca Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Montréal, QC July 2019
SLIDE 2 linguistics has not always considered “hot cognition” & individual differences
e.g. Van Berkum et al. 2005
SLIDE 3 individuals use world knowledge & real world context in language comprehension
Kamide et al. 2003, Nieuwland et al. 2006, Sedivy et al. 1999, Tanenhaus et al. 1995, Traxler 2014
SLIDE 4 Boland & Queen 2016, Havas et al. 2007, Van Berkum et al. 2008, Van Berkum et al. 2009, Van den Brink et al. 2010
social context, beliefs, & values
personality? political views? disgust sensitivity?
SLIDE 5 Disgust Sensitivity
protects from novel pathogens general cognition ➜ out-group stereotyping, political views differs between individuals language processing?
Inbar et al. 2011, Smith et al. 2011
SLIDE 6
The Pupillometry Paradigm
cognitive effort mental workload attention arousal
SLIDE 7 Materials
Type of clash Example morpho-syntactic error She often ride her bike to work in the summer. semantic anomaly People often read heads for pleasure before bed. socio-cultural clash I always wear hair bands to hold in my bangs.
SLIDE 8
Post-Tests
Big Five personality inventory Disgust Scale - Revised
SLIDE 9 Participants
n 76 male/ female 18 / 58 age (yrs) min - max 18 - 83 age (yrs) mean 25.0
SLIDE 10 Data Pre-Processing
￮ downsampled to 125 Hz ￮ blinks removed ￮ numerical predictors normalized & centered interest period:
- 500ms to 2000ms around clash
SLIDE 11
Analysis: GAM Modelling in R
➔ no data lost in time-binning ➔ modelling non-linear relationships Interaction of interest Extra-linguistic variable x Time x Item rating Random structure Participant x Time random slope Item random intercept
SLIDE 12
Morpho-Syntactic Errors
She often ride her bike to work... Neuroticism x Time x Item rating
SLIDE 13
Morpho-Syntactic Errors
She often ride her bike to work... Neuroticism x Time x Item rating
SLIDE 14
Neuroticism
➔ morpho-syntactic errors ➔ more ➜ larger
SLIDE 15
Socio-Cultural Clashes
I always wear hair bands... Disgust sensitivity x Time x Item rating
SLIDE 16
Socio-Cultural Clashes
I always wear hair bands... Disgust sensitivity x Time x Item rating
SLIDE 17
Disgust Sensitivity
➔ socio-cultural clashes ➔ higher ➜ larger
SLIDE 18 Results
- disgust sensitivity ➜ language comprehension
- extra-linguistic variables / listener-internal
aspects do not affect comprehension across the board
- support one-step models of language
comprehension
Kamide et al. 2003, Sedivy et al. 1999, Tanenhaus et al. 1995, Traxler 2014
SLIDE 19 Open Questions / Future Research
￮
￮ different methodologies/paradigms ➔ tie-in with: ◆ linguistic anticipation? ◆ bio-energetic account?
Havas et al., 2007; Zadra & Clore, 2011; Van Berkum et al., 2013
SLIDE 20 Thank You!
Questions?
slides design: based on “Cymbeline” by SlidesCarnival images: Unsplash Isabell Hubert & Juhani Järvikivi isabell.hubert@ualberta.ca Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society Montreal, QC July 2019
