Dataset Information

Listener's personality traits predict changes in pupil size during auditory language comprehension.

ABSTRACT: Research suggests that listeners' comprehension of spoken language is concurrently affected by linguistic and non-linguistic factors, including individual difference factors. However, there is no systematic research on whether general personality traits affect language processing. We correlated 88 native English-speaking participants' Big-5 traits with their pupillary responses to spoken sentences that included grammatical errors, "He frequently have burgers for dinner"; semantic anomalies, "Dogs sometimes chase teas"; and statements incongruent with gender stereotyped expectations, such as "I sometimes buy my bras at Hudson's Bay", spoken by a male speaker. Generalized additive mixed models showed that the listener's Openness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism traits modulated resource allocation to the three different types of unexpected stimuli. No personality trait affected changes in pupil size across the board: less open participants showed greater pupil dilation when processing sentences with grammatical errors; and more introverted listeners showed greater pupil dilation in response to both semantic anomalies and socio-cultural clashes. Our study is the first one demonstrating that personality traits systematically modulate listeners' online language processing. Our results suggest that individuals with different personality profiles exhibit different patterns of the allocation of cognitive resources during real-time language comprehension.

SUBMITTER: Hubert Lyall I

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7940482 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Listener's personality traits predict changes in pupil size during auditory language comprehension.

Hubert Lyall Isabell I Järvikivi Juhani J

Scientific reports 20210308 1

Research suggests that listeners' comprehension of spoken language is concurrently affected by linguistic and non-linguistic factors, including individual difference factors. However, there is no systematic research on whether general personality traits affect language processing. We correlated 88 native English-speaking participants' Big-5 traits with their pupillary responses to spoken sentences that included grammatical errors, "He frequently have burgers for dinner"; semantic anomalies, "Dog ...[more]

PMID: 33686122

Similar Datasets

Project description:Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we identified cortical regions mediating interpretive processes that take place during language comprehension. We manipulated participants' interpretation of texts by asking them to focus on action-, space-, or time-related features while listening to identical short stories. We identify several cortical regions where activity varied significantly in response to this attention manipulation, even though the content being processed was exactly the same. Activity in the posterior and anterior sections of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), which are thought to have different sensitivities to high-level language processing, was modulated by the listeners' attentional focus, but in ways that were quite different. The posterior left IFG (Pars Opercularis) showed different activity levels for the three conditions. However, a population coding analysis demonstrated similar distributions of activity across conditions. This suggests that while the gain of the response in the Pars Opercularis was modulated, its core organization was relatively invariant across the experimental conditions. In the anterior left IFG (Pars Triangularis), the analysis of population codes revealed different activity patterns between conditions: there was little similarity between activity during time-attention and action- and space-attention, however there were similar activity patterns while attending to space and action information. In addition, both the left superior temporal gyrus and sulcus showed greater activity in the space and action attention conditions when contrasted with time attention. We discuss these findings in light of work on the role of left IFG in processing semantic information in language, and in light of theories suggesting that temporal information in language is processed in the brain using similar mechanisms as spatial information. Our findings suggest that a substantial source of variance in neural activity during language comprehension emerges from the internally-driven, information-seeking preferences of listeners rather than the syntactic or semantic properties of a text.

Project description:In the present preregistered study, we evaluated the possibility of a shared cognitive mechanism during verbal and non-verbal tasks and therefore the implication of domain-general cognitive control during language comprehension. We hypothesized that a behavioral cost will be observed during a dual-task including both verbal and non-verbal difficult processing. Specifically, to test this claim, we designed a dual-task paradigm involving: an auditory language comprehension task (sentence comprehension) and a non-verbal Flanker task (including congruent and incongruent trials). We manipulated sentence ambiguity and evaluated if the ambiguity effect modified behavioral performances in the non-verbal Flanker task. Under the assumption that ambiguous sentences induce a more difficult process than unambiguous sentences, we expected non-verbal flanker task performances to be impaired only when a simultaneous difficult language processing is performed. This would be specifically reflected by a performance cost during incongruent Flanker items only during ambiguous sentence presentation. Conversely, we observed a facilitatory effect for the incongruent Flanker items during ambiguous sentence suggesting better non-verbal inhibitory performances when an ambiguous sentence was simultaneously processed. Exploratory data analysis suggests that this effect is not only related to a more difficult language processing but also to the previous (n-1) Flanker item. Indeed, results showed that incongruent n-1 Flanker items led to a facilitation of the incongruent synchronized Flanker items only when ambiguous sentences were conjointly presented. This result, even if it needs to be corroborated in future studies, suggests that the recruitment of executive control mechanisms facilitates subsequent executive control implication during difficult language processing. The present study suggests a common executive control mechanism during difficult verbal and non-verbal tasks.

Dataset Information

Listener's personality traits predict changes in pupil size during auditory language comprehension.

Publications

Listener's personality traits predict changes in pupil size during auditory language comprehension.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets