Perspective conflict disrupts pragmatic inference in real-time language comprehension

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Barr, Dale J and Sirniö, Hanna and Kovács, Beáta and O'Shea, Kieran J and McNee, Shannon and Beith, Alistair and Britain, Heather and Li, Qintong (2025) Perspective conflict disrupts pragmatic inference in real-time language comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. ISSN 0278-7393 (https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001455)

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Abstract

In two visual-world eyetracking experiments, we investigated how effectively addressees use information about a speaker's perspective to resolve temporary ambiguities in spoken expressions containing prenominal scalar adjectives (e.g., ). The experiments used a new "Display Change" task to create situations where an addressee's perspective conflicted with that of a speaker, allowing the point of disambiguation (early vs. late) to be specified independently from each perspective. Contrary to existing perspective-taking theories, the only situation in which addressees resolved references early was when perspectives afforded early disambiguation. When perspectives conflicted, addressees exhibited a lower rate of preferential looks to the target and slower response times. This disruption to contrastive inference reflects either the suspension of pragmatic inferencing or cognitive limitations on the simultaneous representation and use of incompatible perspectives. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

ORCID iDs

Barr, Dale J, Sirniö, Hanna, Kovács, Beáta, O'Shea, Kieran J ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7587-8537, McNee, Shannon, Beith, Alistair, Britain, Heather and Li, Qintong;
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