Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We report on initial findings from a pupillometry study thatinvestigated the influence of two extra-linguistic variables,namely Neuroticism and Disgust Sensitivity, on auditory lan-guage comprehension in adults. Results suggest that: (1) Lan-guage comprehension is influenced by extra-linguistic vari-ables and individual differences; (2) the processing of differ-ent kinds of linguistic errors, as opposed to clashes with anindividual’s value or belief system, are influenced by differ-ent extra-linguistic variables; and that (3) Disgust Sensitiv-ity at least partially predicts pupillary responses to utterancesclashing with an individual’s belief system. Results are dis-cussed with regards to linguistic anticipation, cognitive effortand arousal, and resource allocation.