The role of executive function in perspective taking during online language comprehension

Sarah Brown‐Schmidt · 2009 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3758/pbr.16.5.893

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Summary

This study investigates the role of executive function, specifically inhibition control, in perspective-taking during online language comprehension. While interlocutors maintain representations of shared beliefs (common ground), it remains unclear whether these representations constrain initial language interpretation processes. Previous findings have been equivocal, with some evidence suggesting early use of perspective and other evidence suggesting unreliable or late use. The author proposes that individual differences in inhibition control account for occasional failures to use perspective information, particularly when inhibiting egocentric interpretations of temporary referential ambiguities. The experiment involved 48 native English-speaking participants who engaged in an interactive dialogue task while their eye movements were monitored. Participants viewed a grid of animals, some in visual common ground with the experimenter and others in privileged ground. The experimenter asked questions containing temporary ambiguities that could be resolved by considering whose perspective was relevant. Two factors were manipulated: whether a competitor referent was mentioned in prior discourse (linguistic common ground) and whether that mention was grounded by the experimenter. Additionally, participants completed two inhibitory control tasks: a nonverbal task requiring the suppression of responses to specific shapes and a verbal Stroop task requiring the inhibition of reading color words in favor of naming their font color. Results indicated that when a competitor was mentioned and grounded, participants successfully used perspective information to inhibit fixations on the competitor, directing attention instead to the target. This effect was attenuated when the competitor was mentioned but not grounded, suggesting that perspective sensitivity depends on collaboratively established common ground. Crucially, performance on the verbal Stroop task significantly predicted individual differences in perspective use; participants with better inhibition control were more successful at suppressing perspective-inappropriate interpretations. In contrast, performance on the nonverbal inhibitory control task did not significantly predict perspective-taking success, likely due to ceiling effects or differences in the type of inhibition required. The findings suggest that perspective information routinely guides online language processing, and failures to use this information can be attributed partly to difficulties in inhibiting egocentric interpretations. The results support constraint-based models of language processing, where perspective is one of multiple probabilistic constraints, and highlight the importance of inhibition control in managing conflicting information sources. The study also indicates that grounding plays a critical role, as perspective information is weighted less strongly when it is not interactively established. These conclusions imply that individual differences in executive function are key to understanding variability in perspective-taking during conversation, offering a partial explanation for previously conflicting results in the literature.

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• executive function