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Poster

Pupillometry reveals increased processing demands for indirect request comprehension

MPG-Autoren
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Tromp,  Johanne
Psychology of Language Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Meyer,  Antje S.
Language Comprehension Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Hagoort,  Peter
Neurobiology of Language Department, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Zitation

Tromp, J., Meyer, A. S., & Hagoort, P. (2015). Pupillometry reveals increased processing demands for indirect request comprehension. Poster presented at the 14th Conference of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA 2015), Antwerp, Belgium.


Zitierlink: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-002B-9C5D-8
Zusammenfassung
Fluctuations in pupil size have been shown to reflect variations in processing demands during language comprehension. Increases in pupil diameter have been observed as a consequence of syntactic anomalies (Schluroff 1982), increased syntactic complexity (Just & Carpenter 1993) and lexical ambiguity (Ben- Nun 1986). An issue that has not received attention is whether pupil size also varies due to pragmatic manipulations. In a pupillometry experiment, we investigated whether pupil diameter is sensitive to increased processing demands as a result of comprehending an indirect request versus a statement. During natural conversation, communication is often indirect. For example, in an appropriate context, ''It'' cold in here'' is a request to shut the window, rather than a statement about room temperature (Holtgraves 1994). We tested 49 Dutch participants (mean age = 20.8). They were presented with 120 picture-sentence combinations that could either be interpreted as an indirect request (a picture of a window with the sentence ''it's hot here'') or as a statement (a picture of a window with the sentence ''it's nice here''). The indirect requests were non-conventional, i.e. they did not contain directive propositional content and were not directly related to the underlying felicity conditions (Holtgraves 2002). In order to verify that the indirect requests were recognized, participants were asked to decide after each combination whether or not they heard a request. Based on the hypothesis that understanding this type of indirect utterances requires additional inferences to be made on the part of the listener (e.g., Holtgraves 2002; Searle 1975; Van Ackeren et al. 2012), we predicted a larger pupil diameter for indirect requests than statements. The data were analyzed using linear mixed-effects models in R, which allow for simultaneous inclusion of participants and items as random factors (Baayen, Davidson, & Bates 2008). The results revealed a larger mean pupil size and a larger peak pupil size for indirect requests as compared to statements. In line with previous studies on pupil size and language comprehension (e.g., Just & Carpenter 1993), this difference was observed within a 1.5 second window after critical word onset. We suggest that the increase in pupil size reflects additional on-line processing demands for the comprehension of non-conventional indirect requests as compared to statements. This supports the idea that comprehending this type of indirect request requires capacity demanding inferencing on the part of the listener. In addition, this study demonstrates the usefulness of pupillometry as a tool for experimental research in pragmatics.