Abstract
Individuals' moral views have been shown to affect their event-related potentials (ERP) response to spoken statements, and people's political ideology has been shown to guide their sentence completion behavior. Using pupillometry, we asked whether political ideology and disgust sensitivity affect online spoken language comprehension. 60 native speakers of English listened to spoken utterances while their pupil size was tracked. Some of those utterances contained grammatical errors, semantic anomalies, or socio-cultural violations, statements incongruent with existing gender stereotypes and perceived speaker identity, such as “I sometimes buy my bras at Hudson's Bay,” spoken by a male speaker. An individual's disgust sensitivity is associated with the Behavioral Immune System, and may be correlated with socio-political attitudes, for example regarding out-group stigmatization. We found that more disgust-sensitive individuals showed greater pupil dilation with semantic anomalies and socio-cultural violations. However, political views differently affected the processing of the two types of violations: whereas more conservative listeners showed a greater pupil response to socio-cultural violations, more progressive listeners engaged more with semantic anomalies, but this effect appeared much later in the pupil record.
Highlights
Language comprehension is a complex process: The listener has to identify the sounds in a word, recognize the word form, retrieve information associated with this form (Cutler and Clifton, 1999; Sahin et al, 2009), and integrate the word into the rapidly unfolding context within a few hundreds of milliseconds (Hagoort and Indefrey, 2014; Levinson, 2016) in an incremental fashion (Altmann and Kamide, 1999; Sedivy et al, 1999; Kamide et al, 2003; Hagoort and Van Berkum, 2007)
We investigate whether two further individual difference factors, an individual’s propensity to disgust as well as their political views, are associated with their language processing performance
All models included a random smooth for participant by time, and a random intercept by item to account for individual differences within the stimuli, and for random variance between participants beyond the factors of interest
Summary
Language comprehension is a complex process: The listener has to identify the sounds in a word, recognize the word form, retrieve information associated with this form (Cutler and Clifton, 1999; Sahin et al, 2009), and integrate the word into the rapidly unfolding context within a few hundreds of milliseconds (Hagoort and Indefrey, 2014; Levinson, 2016) in an incremental fashion (Altmann and Kamide, 1999; Sedivy et al, 1999; Kamide et al, 2003; Hagoort and Van Berkum, 2007). Important, both speaker-related attributes, for example unfamiliar accents (Porretta et al, 2016; Grey and van Hell, 2017; Porretta and Tucker, 2019; Arnhold et al, 2020) or inferred gender (Van Berkum et al, 2008), as well as listener-based individual differences (Van den Brink et al, 2012; Hubert Lyall and Järvikivi, 2021) have been found to affect language comprehension ease. We investigate whether two further individual difference factors, an individual’s propensity to disgust as well as their political views, are associated with their language processing performance
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