Sentence comprehension test for Russian: A tool to assess syntactic competence

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Linguistics
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Healthy adults exhibit significant variation in native language syntactic processing, yet few tests assess this.
• Existing psycholinguistic tests often yield ceiling effects, masking individual differences in syntactic comprehension.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate a Sentence Comprehension Test for Russian to capture individual variations in syntactic processing.
• To identify specific grammatical constructions that pose challenges for native Russian speakers.

Main Methods:

• Developed a Sentence Comprehension Test with 60 complex and 40 simpler Russian sentences, each with a comprehension question.
• Selected complex constructions based on literature review and pilot testing, identifying six key error-inducing structures.
• Validated the test through two experiments, comparing reading and listening modes and correlating results with verbal working memory span.

Main Results:

• The developed test effectively captures variations in syntactic processing without ceiling effects.
• Identified six specific grammatical constructions in Russian that are associated with higher error rates and longer processing times.
• Test-retest reliability was confirmed across two experiments and two presentation modes (reading/listening).
• Results correlated significantly with verbal working memory capacity.

Conclusions:

• The Sentence Comprehension Test is a reliable tool for assessing individual differences in Russian syntactic processing.
• The identified complex constructions provide insights into sources of syntactic processing difficulties.
• The test's correlation with working memory suggests a link between these cognitive functions and syntactic comprehension.