How culture influences perspective taking: differences in correction, not integration

Shali Wu,Dale J Barr,Boaz Keysar,Timothy M Gann

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00822

Abstract

Individuals from East Asian (Chinese) backgrounds have been shown to exhibit greater sensitivity to a speaker’s perspective than Western (U.S.) participants when resolving referentially ambiguous expressions. We show that this cultural difference does not reflect better integration of social information during language processing, but rather is the result of differential correction: in the earliest moments of referential processing, Chinese participants showed equivalent egocentric interference to Westerners, but managed to suppress the interference earlier and more effectively. A time-series analysis of visual-world eye-tracking data found that the two cultural groups diverged extremely late in processing, between 600 and 1400 ms after the onset of egocentric interference. We suggest that the early moments of referential processing reflect the operation of a universal stratum of processing that provides rapid ambiguity resolution at the cost of accuracy and flexibility. Late components, in contrast, reflect the mapping of outputs from referential processes to decision-making and action planning systems, allowing for a flexibility in responding that is molded by culturally specific demands.

Highlights

The human language comprehension system is shaped by informational demands related to communication that are relatively universal, as well as by demands of a more social nature that can vary widely across cultures
There was little evidence that Chinese participants experienced any less interference than U.S participants until 1767 ms, approximately 1000 ms after the onset of interference
Overall, our findings support the hypothesis that language users from different cultures share a common stratum of referential processing, with cultural variation in how the products of these early referential processes are used in the higher-level processes governing thought and action

Summary

Introduction

The human language comprehension system is shaped by informational demands related to communication that are relatively universal, as well as by demands of a more social nature that can vary widely across cultures. We investigated cultural differences in how Chinese vs Western (U.S.) language users take into account a speaker’s diverging perspective when they resolve ambiguous references such as the candle. Referring expressions are of theoretical interest because they are ubiquitous in conversation, and because they require listeners to go beyond the input – an expression such as the candle denotes a particular class of object, not any particular individual object, and so listeners must access further information to determine which candle is being spoken about. It is methodologically convenient to study visual perspective taking during reference resolution, because a listener’s eye gaze during the search for a referent provides an external index of the moment-by-moment process of language interpretation (Cooper, 1974; Tanenhaus et al, 1995). The waxing and waning of referential alternatives during processing will be reflected in moment-by-moment changes in the probability distribution of eye gaze over these alternatives

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