Schedule of Events | Symposia

Eye-gaze, reference and race

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Dr Veena D. Dwivedi¹ (vdwivedi@brocku.ca), Haorong Ding¹; ¹Brock University

We examined how healthy young adults interpreted sentences when combined with the visual cue of still faces depicting differing eye-gaze (direct vs. averted). We also investigated whether the race of the face (Caucasian vs. East Asian) would impact sentence interpretation. In two web-based studies, monolingual English-speaking participants (mostly Caucasian) were asked to read sentences where direct objects were specific or non-specific e.g., “The kid climbed that/a tree…”, and rate their acceptability, on a scale of 1-7. In the absence of previous linguistic context, use of specific “that” as in “that tree” should be less acceptable than non-specific “a tree”. In the first experiment (N=90), these sentences were paired with emotionally neutral Caucasian faces, and in the second study (N=90), with East Asian faces. Results revealed that ratings for sentences with specific reference were significantly lower than those with non-specific reference in both studies. Next, we predicted that averted gaze, ostensibly a form of visual pointing, would improve judgments for sentences using specific “that”. It did not. Rather, results with Caucasian faces (N=90) revealed that averted gaze improved ratings for sentences using non-specific “a/an”. Perhaps averted eye-gaze can bolster meaning, when underspecified (as indicated by non-specific “a/an”), but cannot repair ungrammaticality (as indicated by specific “that”). The same sentences stimuli, when paired with East Asian faces, yielded no effects of gaze at all. These findings reveal that still faces, i.e., without any acoustic cues such as accent, can modulate simple sentence interpretation tasks, due to race.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Semantic