Who is respectful? Effects of social context and individual empathic ability on ambiguity resolution during utterance comprehension.
Who is respectful? Effects of social context and individual empathic ability on ambiguity resolution during utterance comprehension.
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谁值得尊重？
DOI：
10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01588
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发表时间：
2015
影响因子：
3.8
通讯作者：
Zhou X
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Jiang X;Zhou X
言语交流常常是模棱两可的。通过采用事件相关电位（ERP）技术，本研究调查了理解者如何利用有关传播者社会地位的信息来解决指称歧义。参与者阅读一个对话场景，其中包括描述说话者和另外两个具有相同或不同社会地位的人的最小对话上下文以及直接引用的话语。话语中的单数第二人称代词（汉语中的“nin/nin-de”）对于两个人中谁是收件人而言可能是含糊不清的（“模糊条件”）。或者，代词不是含糊不清的，要么是因为两个人中的一个人具有较高的社会地位，因此根据社会惯例应该是收件人（“地位条件”），要么是因为在代词之前额外插入了一个指代某人的地位的词以帮助指示代词的所指对象（“所指条件”）。结果表明，在模糊、状态和所指条件下，感知的模糊性有所下降。从电生理学角度来看，代词在指称词中引起的 N400 比在状态和歧义条件下增加，反映出由于需要将代词与其先行词和状态词联系起来而增加了整合需求。相对于参照条件，从 600 毫秒开始，状态条件会引发延迟的、持续的阳性，而模糊条件会引发更延迟的、前面的阴性。此外，N400效应受个体对社会地位信息的敏感性调节，而晚期积极效应则受个体共情能力调节。这些发现强调了话语理解过程中参考处理中上下文偏差的神经认知灵活性。
Verbal communication is often ambiguous. By employing the event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study investigated how a comprehender resolves referential ambiguity by using information concerning the social status of communicators. Participants read a conversational scenario which included a minimal conversational context describing a speaker and two other persons of the same or different social status and a directly quoted utterance. A singular, second-person pronoun in the respectful form (nin/nin-de in Chinese) in the utterance could be ambiguous with respect to which of the two persons was the addressee (the “Ambiguous condition”). Alternatively, the pronoun was not ambiguous either because one of the two persons was of higher social status and hence should be the addressee according to social convention (the “Status condition”) or because a word referring to the status of a person was additionally inserted before the pronoun to help indicate the referent of the pronoun (the “Referent condition”). Results showed that the perceived ambiguity decreased over the Ambiguous, Status, and Referent conditions. Electrophysiologically, the pronoun elicited an increased N400 in the Referent than in the Status and the Ambiguous conditions, reflecting an increased integration demand due to the necessity of linking the pronoun to both its antecedent and the status word. Relative to the Referent condition, a late, sustained positivity was elicited for the Status condition starting from 600 ms, while a more delayed, anterior negativity was elicited for the Ambiguous condition. Moreover, the N400 effect was modulated by individuals' sensitivity to the social status information, while the late positivity effect was modulated by individuals' empathic ability. These findings highlight the neurocognitive flexibility of contextual bias in referential processing during utterance comprehension.