Listener's personality traits predict changes in pupil size during auditory language comprehension.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Listener comprehension is influenced by linguistic and non-linguistic factors.
• Individual differences, including personality, may impact language processing.
• Systematic research on personality traits and language processing is lacking.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between Big-5 personality traits and language processing.
• To determine if personality traits modulate cognitive resource allocation during spoken language comprehension.
• To examine pupillary responses to grammatical errors, semantic anomalies, and gender stereotype violations.

Main Methods:

• Correlated Big-5 personality traits with pupillary responses in 88 native English speakers.
• Presented participants with spoken sentences containing grammatical errors, semantic anomalies, and gender stereotype violations.
• Analyzed data using generalized additive mixed models.

Main Results:

• Openness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism modulated resource allocation to unexpected stimuli.
• Less open participants showed greater pupil dilation for grammatical errors.
• More introverted listeners exhibited greater pupil dilation for semantic anomalies and socio-cultural clashes.

Conclusions:

• This study is the first to demonstrate that personality traits systematically modulate online language processing.
• Individual personality profiles are associated with distinct patterns of cognitive resource allocation during real-time language comprehension.
• Pupillary responses serve as an objective measure of cognitive effort in language processing influenced by personality.