Are You Asking Me or Telling Me? Using Linguistic Diversity to Explore Foundations of Perspective-Taking in Language Comprehension

Using Linguistic Diversity to Explore Foundations of Perspective-Taking in Language ComprehensionDescriptionThis dataset accompanies the eye-tracking study "Are You Asking Me or Telling Me?", examining real-time speech act comprehension in Mandarin Chinese-speaking adults. Data were collected between May and June 2024 from 54 native Mandarin speakers; 6 were excluded due to unsuccessful eye-tracker calibration, yielding a final analyzed sample of 48 participants.

Eye movements were recorded with an Eyelink-1000 sampling at 1000 Hz while participants performed a referential communication task (Experiment Builder, SR Research), manipulated between subjects as division-of-labor vs. no-division-of-labor task conditions, with speech act (question vs. assertion) as a within-subject factor across 16 critical trials (intermixed with 20 filler trials). Fixation data were aggregated into 50 ms time bins locked to utterance onset, indexing proportions of fixations to target and competitor interest areas.The shared files include the fixation data, an R analysis script reproducing the reported mixed-effects models, and a file with examples of trial items.