Situational-functional settings affect evaluation of linguistic register
Abstract
Overview
Overview
abstract
Although real-time studies point to a tight link between social context and lexical processing, evidence regarding a) explicit sentence judgements, b) social context and grammatical processing and c) socially-situated context and sentence register processing is less clear. In three rating studies (N=32 each), we investigated the influence of the socially-situated context on sentences that (mis)matched in (in)formal register or that (mis)matched in verb-argument / subject-verb congruence. Moreover, exploratory analyses investigated whether context presentation modality (written vs. auditory vs. pictorial) affects ratings as markers of linguistic performance. Participants rated register matching (vs. mismatching) sentences sign. higher in acceptability for pictorial and sign. higher in grammaticality for auditory contexts. Crucially, the interaction between register and semantic verb-argument congruence was significant, revealing that participants rated semantically incongruent sentences as more grammatical only when the register matched with the visually-depicted context. Hence, the situational-functional context seems to influence the assessment of sentence register, which, in turn, seems to affect the perception of semantic congruence of a sentence. Moreover, a pictorial situational-functional context seems to be integrated more easily with a following sentence when participants rated the acceptability of the sentence, while an auditory context can be integrated more easily when participants rated its grammaticality.
