Presentation
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The eyes don’t really have it
Poster A8 in Poster Session A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Veena D. Dwivedi1, Hi Leung1, Haorong Ding1; 1Brock University
The social cue of eye-gaze can convey a range of useful information—including contextual support for referential communication. In the present experiment, we investigated whether eye-gaze direction would facilitate interpretation of sentences exhibiting specific vs. non-specific reference, as in “The kid climbed a/that tree...”. The indefinite determiner “a” biases for a non-specific interpretation of the direct object “tree”, unlike the demonstrative determiner “that”, which conveys a specific meaning for "tree". In the absence of any linguistic context, we hypothesized that sentences with non-specific reference (“a tree”) would be preferred vs. those with specific reference (“that tree”). We asked whether this difference might disappear when sentences with specific reference were supported via the social cue of averted gaze (facilitating referential communication). Finally, given the known lateralization effects for face vs linguistic processing, we also wondered whether differences would be found for more vs. less right/left-handed individuals (i.e., for less vs. more bilateral hemispheric involvement). In an online study, we presented 51 monolingual English speaker participants with emotionally neutral Caucasian faces with direct vs. averted gaze. Each face was followed by a sentence with non-specific or specific reference. Participants made judgments regarding the naturalness of each sentence on a scale of 1-7, and we investigated whether face gaze direction impacted those judgments. Results indicated an overall preference for sentences exhibiting non-specific reference, as well as for sentences following faces with direct gaze vs. averted gaze. No interaction was found between specificity and gaze direction. A negative correlation between handedness and sentence ratings was found. That is, whereas more left-handed/less right-handed (RH-) participants and more right-handed (RH+) participants were strongly sensitive to specificity, only RH- participants were sensitive to eye-gaze direction (showing lower ratings for specific sentences with averted gaze faces). Neither group showed an interaction between specificity and gaze. In sum, our data corroborate intuitive judgments regarding sentences exhibiting non-specific vs. specific reference, as well as other work showing an overall preference for direct gaze. The handedness findings are in line with previous work showing that joint attention is dependent on cortical pathways that are lateralized, such that RH- participants are sensitive to eye gaze/face stimuli, in contrast to RH+ participants.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics, Animal Communication and Comparative/Evolutionary Studies