Corps, R.E. orcid.org/0000-0001-6027-8109, Yang, F. orcid.org/0009-0000-2619-3881 and Pickering, M.J. orcid.org/0000-0002-2005-049X (2023) Evidence against egocentric prediction during language comprehension. Royal Society Open Science, 10 (12). 231252. ISSN 2054-5703
Abstract
Although previous research has demonstrated that language comprehension can be egocentric, there is little evidence for egocentricity during prediction. In particular, comprehenders do not appear to predict egocentrically when the context makes it clear what the speaker is likely to refer to. But do comprehenders predict egocentrically when the context does not make it clear? We tested this hypothesis using a visual-world eye-tracking paradigm, in which participants heard sentences containing the gender-neutral pronoun They (e.g. They would like to wear…) while viewing four objects (e.g. tie, dress, drill, hairdryer). Two of these objects were plausible targets of the verb (tie and dress), and one was stereotypically compatible with the participant's gender (tie if the participant was male; dress if the participant was female). Participants rapidly fixated targets more than distractors, but there was no evidence that participants ever predicted egocentrically, fixating objects stereotypically compatible with their own gender. These findings suggest that participants do not fall back on their own egocentric perspective when predicting, even when they know that context does not make it clear what the speaker is likely to refer to.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2023 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
Keywords: | gender identity; perspective-taking; prediction; visual-world paradigm |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > Department of Psychology (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 08 Aug 2024 13:04 |
Last Modified: | 08 Aug 2024 13:04 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | The Royal Society |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1098/rsos.231252 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:215765 |
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