Common Ground Information Affects Reference Resolution: Evidence From Behavioral Data, ERPs, and Eye-Tracking

Abstract

One of the most important social cognitive skills in humans is the ability to “put oneself in someone else’s shoes,” that is, to take another person’s perspective. In socially situated communication, perspective taking enables the listener to arrive at a meaningful interpretation of what is said (sentence meaning) and what is meant (speaker’s meaning) by the speaker. To successfully decode the speaker’s meaning, the listener has to take into account which information he/she and the speaker share in their common ground (CG). We here further investigated competing accounts about when and how CG information affects language comprehension by means of reaction time (RT) measures, accuracy data, event-related potentials (ERPs), and eye-tracking. Early integration accounts would predict that CG information is considered immediately and would hence not expect to find costs of CG integration. Late integration accounts would predict a rather late and effortful integration of CG information during the parsing process that might be reflected in integration or updating costs. Other accounts predict the simultaneous integration of privileged ground (PG) and CG perspectives. We used a computerized version of the referential communication game with object triplets of different sizes presented visually in CG or PG. In critical trials (i.e., conflict trials), CG information had to be integrated while privileged information had to be suppressed. Listeners mastered the integration of CG (response accuracy 99.8%). Yet, slower RTs, and enhanced late positivities in the ERPs showed that CG integration had its costs. Moreover, eye-tracking data indicated an early anticipation of referents in CG but an inability to suppress looks to the privileged competitor, resulting in later and longer looks to targets in those trials, in which CG information had to be considered. Our data therefore support accounts that foresee an early anticipation of referents to be in CG but a rather late and effortful integration if conflicting information has to be processed. We show that both perspectives, PG and CG, contribute to socially situated language processing and discuss the data with reference to theoretical accounts and recent findings on the use of CG information for reference resolution.

What naturalistic stimuli tell us about pronoun resolution in real-time processing

“…From research on perspective taking it seems, though, that the shift in perspective is not the only factor causing the observed pattern. According to the approach by Harris ( 2021 ) the default perspective holder should be the narrator and a shift from this perspective should elicit enhanced processing costs (for costs of shifting see Sabbagh and Taylor, 2000 ; Zhou et al, 2010 ; Meinhardt et al, 2011 ; Shi et al, 2011 ; Richter et al, 2020 ). In Figure 5 , however, we see the tendency that d-pronouns that render the narrator's perspective cause comparatively high processing costs in form of the frontal positivity.…”

“…In electrophysiology, studies observed positive deflections for shifts of perspective. For instance, Richter et al ( 2020 ) used Keysar et al's ( 2000 ) well-known referential communication game to test the influence of common ground information and privileged information. The authors observed an enhanced frontal late positivity for the condition, in which the perspectives of speaker and addressee differed; this required the integration of common ground information while suppressing privileged information (Richter et al, 2020 ).…”

“…For instance, Richter et al ( 2020 ) used Keysar et al's ( 2000 ) well-known referential communication game to test the influence of common ground information and privileged information. The authors observed an enhanced frontal late positivity for the condition, in which the perspectives of speaker and addressee differed; this required the integration of common ground information while suppressing privileged information (Richter et al, 2020 ). Other studies investigating theory of mind also found positive-going ERP effects at frontal electrodes: Meinhardt et al ( 2011 ) examined false- and true-believe reasoning in experiments based on the Sally-Anne-task (Baron-Cohen et al, 1985 ) and observed a late positivity for the false belief condition relative to the true belief condition.…”