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.

Individual Differences in Political Ideology and Disgust Sensitivity Affect Real-Time Spoken Language Comprehension

“…Prior research suggests that individual's moral views (Van Berkum et al, 2009) as well as aspects of personality ( Van den Brink et al, 2012;Hubert Lyall, 2019;Hubert Lyall and Järvikivi, 2021) predict online spoken language comprehension times. In this research, we asked whether and to what extent person's sensitivity to disgust and their political ideology affect the processing of spoken utterances with different types of violations/clashes.…”

“…However, this does not seem to be the case across-the-board: they found no effect of mood for agreement violations, only for the violations of expectations as prompted by utterances depicting interpersonal events with social causes and consequences. Since both political views and disgust sensitivity have been linked to personality traits (Haidt et al, 1994;Druschel and Sherman, 1999) that themselves affect the processing of spoken statements (Hubert Lyall and Järvikivi, 2021), it may be that, at least partly, these effects stem from the same underlying emotional response (van Berkum, 2020;Wheeler et al, 2020).…”

“…Van den Brink et al (2012) showed that more empathetic listeners showed a larger N400 response to (socially) unusual statements (such as a male adult saying "I cannot sleep without my teddy bear") than their less empathetic counterparts. Hubert Lyall and Järvikivi (2021) showed in a pupillometry study that listeners' Big-5 personality traits systematically modulated listeners' real-time language processing in similar scenarios. For example, less open participants showed greater pupil dilation when processing spoken utterances with morpho-syntactic errors ("He frequently have burgers for dinner"), and more introverted listeners showed greater pupil dilation in response to both semantic anomalies ("I often read heads for pleasure" vs. books) and socio-cultural clashes ("I sometimes buy my bras at Hudson's Bay, " vs. "ties, " spoken by a male speaker).…”

“…Important, both speaker-related attributes, for example unfamiliar accents (Porretta et al, 2016;Grey and van Hell, 2017;Porretta and Tucker, 2019;Arnhold et al, 2020) or inferred gender (Van Berkum et al, 2008), as well as listener-based individual differences (Van den Brink et al, 2012;Hubert Lyall and Järvikivi, 2021) have been found to affect language comprehension ease. In this paper, we investigate whether two further individual difference factors, an individual's propensity to disgust as well as their political views, are associated with their language processing performance.…”

The role of phonology-to-orthography consistency in predicting the degree of pupil dilation induced in processing reduced and unreduced speech

“…While the tonic (or baseline) response is slow-changing and related to the state of arousal or vigilance, the phasic pupillary response is time-locked to task-related events and stimuli (Laeng et al, 2012; Papesh & Goldinger, 2015). The phasic response has been employed in a variety of speech perception and processing studies coupled with various types of tasks, with greater pupil dilation indexing greater cognitive effort: delayed naming (Goldinger et al, 1997; Papesh & Goldinger, 2012; Porretta & Tucker, 2019), speech reception threshold test (Kramer et al, 2013; Zekveld et al, 2014; Zekveld et al, 2010), spoken language comprehension (Hubert Lyall & Järvikivi, 2021), and listening to words or syllables (Hochmann & Papeo, 2014; Tamási et al, 2017) (See Schmidtke (2018) for an overview of pupillometry studies in a wide range of linguistic research).…”