Who is respectful? Effects of social context and individual empathic ability on ambiguity resolution during utterance comprehension

Abstract

Verbal communication is often ambiguous. By employing the event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study investigated how a comprehender resolves referential ambiguity by using information concerning the social status of communicators. Participants read a conversational scenario which included a minimal conversational context describing a speaker and two other persons of the same or different social status and a directly quoted utterance. A singular, second-person pronoun in the respectful form (nin/nin-de in Chinese) in the utterance could be ambiguous with respect to which of the two persons was the addressee (the “Ambiguous condition”). Alternatively, the pronoun was not ambiguous either because one of the two persons was of higher social status and hence should be the addressee according to social convention (the “Status condition”) or because a word referring to the status of a person was additionally inserted before the pronoun to help indicate the referent of the pronoun (the “Referent condition”). Results showed that the perceived ambiguity decreased over the Ambiguous, Status, and Referent conditions. Electrophysiologically, the pronoun elicited an increased N400 in the Referent than in the Status and the Ambiguous conditions, reflecting an increased integration demand due to the necessity of linking the pronoun to both its antecedent and the status word. Relative to the Referent condition, a late, sustained positivity was elicited for the Status condition starting from 600 ms, while a more delayed, anterior negativity was elicited for the Ambiguous condition. Moreover, the N400 effect was modulated by individuals' sensitivity to the social status information, while the late positivity effect was modulated by individuals' empathic ability. These findings highlight the neurocognitive flexibility of contextual bias in referential processing during utterance comprehension.

Addressee Identity and Morphosyntactic Processing in Basque Allocutive Agreement

“…This may mean that speaker and addressee identity do not equally impact processing; for instance, listeners may quickly extract the identity of the speaker from the speech signal, but retrieve addressee identity later via a different mechanism. These results expand the current research on the processing of addressee identity (Jiang et al, 2013 ; Jiang and Zhou, 2015a , b ) and the relationship between pragmatic and morphosyntactic information (Momo et al, 2008 ; Yoshimura and MacWhinney, 2010 ). Given the evidence for an effect of speaker identity on morphosyntactic processing (Hanulíková et al, 2012 ; Hanulíková and Carreiras, 2015 ) and the lack of a main effect in the acceptability judgment task in the present study, it may be that the interaction between pragmatic and morphosyntactic information differs depending on the type of context information or morphosyntactic structure.…”

“…In one study, researchers compared the processing of addressee-directed and overheard responses to a mock job interview and reported similar functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activation patterns (Bašnáková et al, 2015 ). More relevant to the current investigation, studies investigating politeness (Jiang et al, 2013 ; Jiang and Zhou, 2015a , b ) showed an early and disambiguating ERP effect of incongruence between interlocutor social status and formal or informal pronouns. Research has also been done on the side of morphosyntax with Japanese honorifics, which show interlocutor social status in verbal morphology.…”

Neural systems for evaluating speaker (Un)believability

“…Recent EEG studies demonstrate that individuals who display higher interpersonal reactivity (IRI score) also exhibit a stronger delayed positivity (around 900–1600 ms postonset of speech) when processing utterances that encode a speaker's feeling of unknowing [Jiang and Pell, ], conflicting messages in expressed certainty [Jiang and Pell, ], or which lack specificity about who an uttered person refers to [Jiang and Zhou, ]. One common feature of these studies, which all report an increased response in listeners who are arguably more “socially aware,” is that contextual cues are available for the listeners to reconcile speaker meaning in face of processing difficulties.…”

Prefrontal Cortex: Role in Language Communication during Social Interaction

“…This N400 enhancement was only observed in those showing higher pragmatic abilities (measured by Autism-Spectrum Quotient Questionnaire) but not in those with lower abilities [97]. Other studies also observed that those with higher empathic ability demonstrated larger N400 response in spoken sentences which contained words mismatching the speaker identity (e.g., I want a teddy bear in a man's voice) or larger late positivity effect in sentences that required the resolution of ambiguous referential representations based on a social context (e.g., a respectful second-person pronoun that is used in a directly quoted utterance that was addressed by a lower-status speaker to two potential addressees one of whom was of higher status [98,99]). These neural mechanisms associated with pragmatic processing were either absent or altered in those with lower empathic ability.…”