Pupillary responses to syntactic ambiguity of sentences |
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| Authors: | Michael Schluroff Thomas E. Zimmermann R. B. Freeman Jr. Klaus Hofmeister Thomas Lorscheid Arno Weber |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Penn Image Computing and Science Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA;2. Department of Bioengineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA;3. Department of Neurology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA;4. Department of Neurology, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA;5. Department of Radiology, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA;1. Instituto de Investigación Médica Mercedes y Martin Ferreyra, INIMEC-CONICET-Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina;2. Center for Development and Behavioral Neuroscience, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY, USA;3. Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina;4. Unidad Hospitalaria San Roque, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina;5. Hospital Aeronáutico, Cordoba, Argentina |
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| Abstract: | Pupillary responses have proven to be reliable physiological correlates of cognitive effort in a variety of tasks, including language processing. To investigate the relation between psychological and syntactic complexity 20 syntactically ambiguous sentences, balanced for bias, were presented to 16 subjects, while their pupil size was continuously measured. These sentences could be read as verb oriented (syntactically more complex) or object oriented (syntactically less complex). Principal components analysis of pupillary movements revealed that verb-oriented readings, resulted in greater pupillary dilations than object-oriented readings, indicating that syntactically more complex sentences, as determined via a formal grammar, require greater cognitive effort in processing. This is viewed as further evidence for the notion that syntactic and psychological complexity are related. High- and low-bias sentences did not induce comparable differences in pupillary movements, indicating that the "multiple meaning theory" may have to be modified. |
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