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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jan 8, 2026

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects

Published on: November 30, 2018

Eye-tracking context formality effects in German and Japanese sentence processing.

Valentina N Pescuma¹, Kohei Haneda², Aine Ito^2,3

¹Department of German Studies and Linguistics, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany. pescumav@hu-berlin.de.

Scientific Reports

|December 17, 2025

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Language processing is influenced by social context like formality. This study found that formality effects emerge later in German than in Japanese, reflecting differences in how languages encode social hierarchy.

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Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Sociolinguistics
Cognitive Science

Background:

Context rapidly influences language processing.
The impact of social information (respect, formality) on language processing across different cultural and linguistic contexts remains unclear.
Languages vary in their grammatical encoding of social hierarchy, impacting how formality is processed.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how social formality affects language processing in German and Japanese.
To compare the timing and nature of formality processing in languages with differing social hierarchy structures.
To determine if formality effects are immediate or delayed compared to morphosyntactic processing.

Main Methods:

Manipulated formality congruence in German sentence pairs.
Manipulated formality-style (exalted vs. humble) in Japanese sentences.
Measured reading times (first-pass, first fixation duration) to assess processing.
Used morphosyntactic incongruence in German as a baseline for immediate processing.

Main Results:

In German, formality mismatch effects appeared later than morphosyntactic mismatch effects.
In Japanese, formality-style effects were observed early (at the first mismatching word) in a later measure (first fixation duration).
Processing differences were linked to the degree to which formality is grammatically encoded.

Conclusions:

Formality processing speed varies across languages based on their social hierarchy structures.
Languages like Japanese, which grammatically encode social markers, show earlier formality effects than languages like German.
Findings contribute to understanding cross-linguistic variation in social cognition and language processing.