Linguistic Information in Auditory Dynamic Events Contributes to the Detection of Fine, Not Coarse Event Boundaries

Abstract

Human observers (comprehenders) segment dynamic information into discrete events. That is, although there is continuous sensory information, comprehenders perceive boundaries between two meaningful units of information. In narrative comprehension, comprehenders use linguistic, non-linguistic , and physical cues for this event boundary perception. Yet, it is an open question - both from a theoretical and an empirical perspective - how linguistic and non-linguistic cues contribute to this process. The current study explores how linguistic cues contribute to the participants' ability to segment continuous auditory information into discrete, hierarchically structured events. Native speakers of German and non-native speakers, who neither spoke nor understood German, segmented a German audio drama into coarse and fine events. Whereas native participants could make use of linguistic, non-linguistic, and physical cues for segmentation, non-native participants could only use non-linguistic and physical cues. We analyzed segmentation behavior in terms of the ability to identify coarse and fine event boundaries and the resulting hierarchical structure. Non-native listeners identified almost identical coarse event boundaries as native listeners, but missed some of the fine event boundaries identified by the native listeners. Interestingly, hierarchical event perception (as measured by hierarchical alignment and enclosure) was comparable for native and non-native participants. In summary, linguistic cues contributed particularly to the identification of certain fine event boundaries. The results are discussed with regard to the current theories of event cognition.

Keywords: event cognition; event hierarchy; event segmentation; linguistic information.

Figure 1

Boxplots depicting the number of identified event boundaries (i.e., key presses) for native and non-native participants as a function of segmentation grain (fine, coarse). The following outliers are not visible in the figure: native fine 313, 378, 561, and 655; non-native fine 169, 310, and 387; native coarse 280.

Figure 2

The segmentation agreement as a function of segmentation grain (left: fine boundaries; right: coarse boundaries), language and reference group norm. Error bars represent the SEM.