Reading Minds, Reading Stories: Social-Cognitive Abilities Affect the Linguistic Processing of Narrative Viewpoint

Sorry, you make less sense to me: The effect of non-native speaker status on metaphor processing

Preconceived assumptions about the speaker have been shown to strongly and automatically influence speech interpretation. This study contributes to previous research by investigating the impact of non-nativeness on perceived metaphor sensibility. To eliminate the effects of speech disfluency, we used exclusively written sentences but introduced their "authors" as having a strong native or non-native accent through a written vignette. The author's language proficiency was never mentioned. Metaphorical sentences featured familiar ("The pictures streamed through her head") and unfamiliar ("The textbooks snored on the desk") verbal metaphors and closely matched literal expressions from a pre-tested database. We also administered a battery of psychological tests to assess whether ratings could be predicted by individual differences. The results revealed that all sentences attributed to the non-native speaker were perceived as less sensical. Incorporating the identity of the non-native speaker also took more effort, as indicated by longer processing and evaluation times. Additionally, while a general bias against non-native speakers emerged even without oral speech, person-based factors played a significant role. Lower ratings of non-native compared to native speakers were largely driven by individuals from less linguistically diverse backgrounds and those with less cognitive reflection. Extraversion and political ideology also modulated ratings in a unique way. The study highlights the impact of preconceived notions about the speaker on sentence processing and the importance of taking interpersonal variation into account.

COVIDisgust: Language processing through the lens of partisanship

Disgust is an aversive reaction protecting an organism from disease. People differ in how prone they are to experiencing it, and this fluctuates depending on how safe the environment is. Previous research has shown that the recognition and processing of disgusting words depends not on the word’s disgust per se but rather on individual sensitivity to disgust. However, the influence of dynamically changing disgust on language comprehension has not yet been researched. In a series of studies, we investigated whether the media’s portrayal of COVID-19 will affect subsequent language processing via changes in disgust. The participants were exposed to news headlines either depicting COVID-19 as a threat or downplaying it, and then rated single words for disgust and valence (Experiment 1; N = 83) or made a lexical decision (Experiment 2; N = 86). The headline type affected only word ratings and not lexical decisions, but political ideology and disgust proneness affected both. More liberal participants assigned higher disgust ratings after the headlines discounted the threat of COVID-19, whereas more conservative participants did so after the headlines emphasized it. We explain the results through the politicization and polarization of the pandemic. Further, political ideology was more predictive of reaction times in Experiment 2 than disgust proneness. High conservatism correlated with longer reaction times for disgusting and negative words, and the opposite was true for low conservatism. The results suggest that disgust proneness and political ideology dynamically interact with perceived environmental safety and have a measurable effect on language processing. Importantly, they also suggest that the media’s stance on the pandemic and the political framing of the issue may affect the public response by increasing or decreasing our disgust.

Reading about minds: The social-cognitive potential of narratives

It is often argued that narratives improve social cognition, either by appealing to social-cognitive abilities as we engage with the story world and its characters, or by conveying social knowledge. Empirical studies have found support for both a correlational and a causal link between exposure to (literary, fictional) narratives and social cognition. However, a series of failed replications has cast doubt on the robustness of these claims. Here, we review the existing empirical literature and identify open questions and challenges. An important conclusion of the review is that previous research has given too little consideration to the diversity of narratives, readers, and social-cognitive processes involved in the social-cognitive potential of narratives. We therefore establish a research agenda, proposing that future research should focus on (1) the specific text characteristics that drive the social-cognitive potential of narratives, (2) the individual differences between readers with respect to their sensitivity to this potential, and (3) the various aspects of social cognition that are potentially affected by reading narratives. Our recommendations can guide the design of future studies that will help us understand how, for whom, and in what respect exposure to narratives can advantage social cognition.