Extra-Linguistic Factors in Language Comprehension

Personality has been found to have significant connections to language. Ranging from impacting narrative style, to informing expectations about others based on linguistic factors such as accent, personality affects both language comprehension and production (Oberlander & Gill, 2004; Van den Brink et al., 2012). However, research in this area primarily focuses on offline measures. Online measures, such as EEG or pupillometry, have not been included until recently. Pupillometry, which involves measuring the size of the pupil, is considered a reliable indicator of cognitive effort during language comprehension. Hubert-Lyall and Jarvikivi are unique in their research studying the possible relationship between personality and online language comprehension due to their use of pupillometry (Hubert & Jarvikivi, 2019; Hubert-Lyall & Jarvikivi, 2021). They showed that several of the Big Five personality traits are related to the processing of errors during language comprehension. Unfortunately, theoretical explanations of the language-personality link are undeveloped. One theory, presented by Hubert and Jarvikivi (2019) and Jimenes-Ortega et. al. (2022) posits that perhaps for Neuroticism, anxiety may be the connecting factor between personality traits and language comprehension. The current studies had two goals. First, we aimed to replicate the findings of Hubert-Lyall and Jarvikivi (2021) using the same methodology but in a new population and culture. Second, we aimed to address a more specific hypothesis -- does Anxiety, through its connection to Neuroticism, predict cognitive load in response to errors in sentences? Overall, we found mixed results. While we did not replicate the findings from Hubert-Lyall and Jarvikivi (2021), nor did our results replicate from our own Experiment 1 to Experiment 2, we did find possible support for the connection between anxiety and language processing. However, it does not seem as though anxiety alone can account for the Neuroticism x language comprehension connection. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]