TY - JOUR
T1 - Empathy influences how listeners interpret intonation and meaning when words are ambiguous
AU - Esteve-Gibert, Núria
AU - Schafer, Amy J.
AU - Hemforth, Barbara
AU - Portes, Cristel
AU - Pozniak, Céline
AU - D’Imperio, Mariapaola
N1 - Funding Information: We thank Caterina Petrone and Yair Haendler for their advice for the statistical analyses. An earlier version of this work was presented at Speech Prosody 2016. We thank the reviewers of that conference for their helpful comments as well as the anonymous reviewers of this journal, which have led to considerable improvement of the present paper. Neither of the experiments reported in this article was formally preregistered. Neither the data nor the materials have been made available on a permanent third-party archive; requests for the data or materials can be sent via email to the lead author at nesteveg@uoc.edu. Funding Information: This work, carried out within the Labex BLRI (ANR-11-LABX-0036), has benefited from support from the French government, managed by the French National Agency for Research (ANR), under the project title Investments of the Future A*MIDEX (ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02). We also benefited from a Mercator Fellowship attributed to C.P. by the German Science Foundation (DFG), Sonderforschungsbereich 732 Incremental Specification in Context, Project A6, at the University of Stuttgart. We thank also the IUF (Institut Universitaire de France) for having funded part of this research through a grant attributed to the last author. Acknowledgments Open practices statement Publisher Copyright: © 2020, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.
PY - 2020/5/1
Y1 - 2020/5/1
N2 - 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.
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.
KW - Empathy
KW - Eye tracking
KW - French
KW - Homophone
KW - Individual differences
KW - Intonation processing
KW - Intonational meaning
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U2 - https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-019-00990-w
DO - https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-019-00990-w
M3 - Article
C2 - 31900798
SN - 0090-502X
VL - 48
SP - 566
EP - 580
JO - Memory and Cognition
JF - Memory and Cognition
IS - 4
ER -