Impact of social cognitive propensity on the processing of nontransparent sentential meaning

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of individual social-cognitive propensity in the processing of nontransparent sentential meaning, exemplified by the morpho-syntactically unsupported iterative meaning in “The frog hopped for five minutes.” Results of our speeded questionnaire in Mandarin Chinese showed that social cognitive propensity of typically-developed individuals, indexed by autistic-like traits, significantly correlated with online response times (RTs) of naturalness rating, while the effect was absent in offline rating scores. Individuals with higher autistic-like traits (i.e., lower social skills) took longer to process sentences with nontransparent meaning for making judgments. We argue that the computation of these sentences involves meaning contextualization—construing a coherent conceptual representation by integrating multiple lexical representations and evaluating sentential-discourse context. Such context-dependent meaning processing requires sufficient context sensitivity, which varies across individuals in association with social cognitive propensity. The pattern is captured by the Dual-Process Approach to information processing and social cognition: individuals with higher autistic-like traits are prone to deliberative reasoning with lower contextual sensitivity. This cognitive bias leads to greater cost when the full comprehension demands meaning contextualization, and therefore longer RTs in evaluating appropriate interpretations. The findings show that individual variability in social cognitive propensity modulates the online computation of nontransparent sentential meaning.