Empathy influences how listeners interpret intonation and meaning when words are ambiguous.

This study examines how individual pragmatic skills, and more specifically, empathy, influences language processing when a temporary lexical ambiguity can be resolved via intonation. We designed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which participants could anticipate a referent before disambigu...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Memory & Cognition Vol. 48; no. 4; pp. 566 - 581
Autores principales: Esteve-Gibert, Núria, Schafer, Amy J., Hemforth, Barbara, Portes, Cristel, Pozniak, Céline, D'Imperio, Mariapaola
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature May2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
fields @attributes:
  recordID: 1
pdfLink:
plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=143359561&site=ehost-live
header:
  @attributes:
    shortDbName: ssf
    uiTerm: 143359561
    longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson)
    uiTag: AN
  controlInfo:
    bkinfo:
    jinfo:
      jid:
        0090502X
        MEG
      jtl: Memory & Cognition
      issn: 0090502X
      maglogo: N
    pubinfo:
      dt: May2020
      vid: 48
      iid: 4
      pid: 237
      pub: Springer Nature
    artinfo:
      ui:
        143359561
        10.3758/s13421-019-00990-w
      ppf: 566
      ppct: 15
      formats:
        fmt:
          – @attributes:
              type: T
          – @attributes:
              type: P
              size: 1.5MB
      tig:
        atl: Empathy influences how listeners interpret intonation and meaning when words are ambiguous.
      aug:
        au:
          Esteve-Gibert, Núria
          Schafer, Amy J.
          Hemforth, Barbara
          Portes, Cristel
          Pozniak, Céline
          D'Imperio, Mariapaola
        affil:
          Aix Marseille Univ., CNRS, LPL, Aix-en-Provence, France
          Estudis de Psicologia i Educació, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), Barcelona, Spain
          University of Hawaii at Mānoa, Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, USA
          Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, CNRS, Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France
          Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA
      su:
        Empathy
        Eye movements
        Listening
        Phonological awareness
      sug:
        subj:
          Empathy
          Eye movements
          Listening
          Phonological awareness
      keyword:
        Eye tracking
        French
        Homophone
        Individual differences
        Intonation processing
        Intonational meaning
        Eye tracking
        French
        Homophone
        Individual differences
        Intonation processing
        Intonational meaning
      ab: This study examines how individual pragmatic skills, and more specifically, empathy, influences language processing when a temporary lexical ambiguity can be resolved via intonation. We designed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which participants could anticipate a referent before disambiguating lexical information became available, by inferring either a contrast meaning or a confirmatory meaning from the intonation contour alone. Our results show that individual empathy skills determine how listeners deal with the meaning alternatives of an ambiguous referent, and the way they use intonational meaning to disambiguate the referent. Listeners with better pragmatic skills (higher empathy) were sensitive to intonation cues when forming sound–meaning associations during the unfolding of an ambiguous referent, and showed higher sensitivity to all the alternative interpretations of that ambiguous referent. Less pragmatically skilled listeners showed weaker processing of intonational meaning because they needed subsequent disambiguating material to select a referent and showed less sensitivity to the set of alternative interpretations. Overall, our results call for taking into account individual pragmatic differences in the study of intonational meaning processing and sentence comprehension in general.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
    refInfo:
    copyright:
      @attributes:
        flag: N
    holdings:
      @attributes:
        islocal: N