Tromp Johanne, Hagoort Peter, Meyer Antje S
a Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics , Nijmegen , The Netherlands.
b International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences , Nijmegen , The Netherlands.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2016;69(6):1093-108. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2015.1065282. Epub 2015 Aug 19.
Fluctuations in pupil size have been shown to reflect variations in processing demands during lexical and syntactic processing in language comprehension. An issue that has not received attention is whether pupil size also varies due to pragmatic manipulations. In two pupillometry experiments, we investigated whether pupil diameter was sensitive to increased processing demands as a result of comprehending an indirect request versus a direct statement. Adult participants were presented with 120 picture-sentence combinations that could be interpreted either as an indirect request (a picture of a window with the sentence "it's very hot here") or as a statement (a picture of a window with the sentence "it's very nice here"). Based on the hypothesis that understanding indirect utterances requires additional inferences to be made on the part of the listener, we predicted a larger pupil diameter for indirect requests than statements. The results of both experiments are consistent with this expectation. We suggest that the increase in pupil size reflects additional processing demands for the comprehension of indirect requests as compared to statements. This research demonstrates the usefulness of pupillometry as a tool for experimental research in pragmatics.
瞳孔大小的波动已被证明能反映语言理解过程中词汇和句法处理时加工需求的变化。一个尚未受到关注的问题是，瞳孔大小是否也会因语用操作而变化。在两项瞳孔测量实验中，我们研究了瞳孔直径是否会因理解间接请求而非直接陈述而对增加的加工需求敏感。成年参与者会看到120组图片 - 句子组合，这些组合既可以被解释为间接请求（一幅窗户的图片，上面写着“这里很热”），也可以被解释为陈述（一幅窗户的图片，上面写着“这里很好”）。基于理解间接话语需要听众进行额外推理的假设，我们预测间接请求的瞳孔直径会比陈述时更大。两项实验的结果都符合这一预期。我们认为，与陈述相比，瞳孔大小的增加反映了理解间接请求时额外的加工需求。这项研究证明了瞳孔测量作为语用学实验研究工具的有用性。
