Empathy Ability Modulates The Sentence Comprehension

A important issue in the language communication is how to understand additional linguistic information,such as the social status of the communicators.In Chinese,when the addressee is of higher status than the speaker,we will communicate in a respect form(nin/nin-de),and we will communicate in a less respect form(ni/ni-de)when the addressee is of equal or lower status.In this study,eye movement was used to examine the processing mechanism of second personal pronouns in the natural presentation of conversational texts in real time,and to examine the regulatory role of the empathy variables in the above phenomena.The types of sentences read include respecting(nin-de)and disrespect(ni-de),the status of both speakers is consistent or inconsistent with the pronoun,and the subjects' empathy ability is divided into high and low groups.Seventy-seven undergraduates who were from northern China participated in the experiment.The results showed that the first fixation duration,single fixation duration,total fixation duration and second fixation duration in the pre-target area showed a third-order interaction.Especially,the higher empathy group was more sensitive to the respectful(nin-de)status-inconsistent.These indicate that higher empathy group is sensitive to respectful(nin-de)status-inconsistent.Interaction between respect and status consistency occurs in the first fixation duration,the single fixation duration,and the gaze duration in the target region.There is a third-order interaction in the regression in count,indicating that participants have different processing mechanisms for the abuse of second-person pronouns.In the subsequent area,there is third-order interactions in the first fixation duration and the regression in count.The lower empathy group is sensitive to the respectful(nin-de)status-inconsistent.These results show that the processing of second-person pronouns is affected by the social status information,which can be reflected in the process of sentence comprehension in time.It has different processing mechanisms for the abuse of different personal pronouns.In addition,empathy ability modulates the sentence comprehension.