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Inconsistency in perspective-taking during comprehension

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Abstract

In order to successfully comprehend referring expressions, a listener must often consider how the speaker’s perspective differs from their own. Such consideration of others’ perspective is effortful and not always employed. Previous studies disagree about whether executive function predicts perspective-taking use in language comprehension. Furthermore, it is unclear whether or not there are consistent individual differences of perspective-taking ability in comprehension. This study tested participants in three perspective-taking in comprehension tasks and two measures of executive function to determine whether participants show consistency in their perspective-taking ability and whether this ability is predicted by measures of executive function. We found that (1) some but not all perspective-taking in comprehension tasks correlate with one another, and (2) inhibition control and working memory are not linked with any of the three perspective-taking measures. Based on these findings, we conclude that perspective-taking in comprehension may not be a unitary ability.

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Open practice statement

Data and program code are available to view online (https://osf.io/nxqke/?view_only=dd7ee188cdcd4f4f919ddea02bbe0ad2).

The experiment was not preregistered.

Notes

  1. We did find that 180-degree trials were responded to more slowly than 90- and 270-degree trials. However, due to the lack of a baseline perspective-match condition, we did not distinguish these angles as separate conditions, as they all require a perspective-mismatch. We did attempt to analyze the blocks task with a mixed-effects model in the same fashion as the other tasks, using degree rotation as the fixed effect; however, when doing this, the participant slopes for condition did not correlate with any of the other tasks.

  2. We use raw RTs rather than log-transformed RTs due to the concern that log-transforming the data may obfuscate real individual differences in right skewed data when doing the correlation analysis. However, using raw RTs may somewhat inflate the reliability of these measures (see Staub, 2021).

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Author note

This study was partially funded by a summer research award to K.L. from the Linguistics Program at the University of South Carolina.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Linguistics Program, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

    Kanan Luce & Amit Almor

  2. Institute for Mind and Brain, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

    Amit Almor

  3. Psychology Department, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

    Amit Almor

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  1. Kanan Luce
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  2. Amit Almor
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Correspondence to Kanan Luce.

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Luce, K., Almor, A. Inconsistency in perspective-taking during comprehension. Psychon Bull Rev 30, 2351–2362 (2023). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02315-0

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