Language comprehension may depend on who you are: how personality traits and social presence seemingly modulate syntactic processing

Although it has been scarcely investigated, personality might help shape language comprehension during social interaction. The aim is to investigate how differences in personality might affect morphosyntactic processing and whether it may be affected by social presence. In a correctness judgement task, participants read sentences that were correct or contained a morphosyntactic error, either while alone or in the mere presence of a confederate. Participants’ NEO-FFI personality inventory scores were used to analyse behavioural, and event related potential data. Neuroticism and Extraversion interacted with error rate and reaction time, while Conscientiousness only interacted with reaction time. A weak N400-like component to morphosyntactic anomalies was triggered for introverts in the social presence condition, compared to a LAN in the alone one, while a LAN was triggered in both conditions for extraverts. Whereas higher Conscientiousness was related to a stronger LAN and a weaker P600 component, lower Conscientiousness reflected the opposite pattern.