Reading span task performance, linguistic experience, and the processing of unexpected syntactic events.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Individual Differences

Background:

• Reading span tasks are commonly used to measure verbal working memory, a key factor in language processing.
• Individual differences in reading span performance may also be influenced by a person's linguistic experiences, particularly with written language.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between reading span scores and print exposure.
• To examine how reading span ability relates to online language processing, specifically sensitivity to statistical regularities in language.
• To determine if these relationships persist after controlling for non-linguistic cognitive abilities.

Main Methods:

• Assessed individual differences in reading span and non-linguistic operation span tasks.
• Measured print exposure using proxy estimates.
• Analyzed reading times on garden-path sentences to gauge sensitivity to statistical language regularities.

Main Results:

• Reading span scores significantly correlated with measures of print exposure.
• Individuals with higher reading spans showed greater sensitivity to statistical language regularities, indicated by longer reading times on ambiguous sentence regions.
• This effect remained significant even after controlling for individual differences in non-linguistic operation span.

Conclusions:

• Reading span scores are influenced by both verbal working memory and linguistic experience (print exposure).
• Experiential factors, such as print exposure, play a crucial role in online sentence processing and individual differences in this ability.
• Future research on individual differences in language processing should incorporate experiential factors alongside cognitive abilities.