Individual differences in syntactic processing: Is there evidence for reader-text interactions?

Publication date: October 2018Source: Journal of Memory and Language, Volume 102Author(s): Ariel N. James, Scott H. Fraundorf, Eun-Kyung Lee, Duane G. WatsonAbstractThere remains little consensus about whether there exist meaningful individual differences in syntactic processing and, if so, what explains them. We argue that this partially reflects the fact that few psycholinguistic studies of individual differences include multiple constructs, multiple measures per construct, or tests for reliable measures. Here, we replicated three major syntactic phenomena in the psycholinguistic literature: use of verb distributional statistics, difficulty of object- versus subject-extracted relative clauses, and resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguities. We examine whether any individual differences in these phenomena could be predicted by language experience or general cognitive abilities (phonological ability, verbal working memory capacity, inhibitory control, and perceptual speed). We find correlations between individual differences and offline, but not online, syntactic phenomena. Condition effects on online reading time were not consistent within individuals, limiting their ability to correlate with other measures. We suggest that this might explain controversy over individual differences in language processing.
Source: Journal of Memory and Language - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research