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Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks

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Individual Differences in Holistic and Compositional Language Processing.

Kyla McConnell¹

¹English Department, Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, DE.

Journal of Cognition

|July 3, 2023

Summary

Individual cognitive differences affect language processing. Some people process word pairs by their parts and co-occurrence, while others process them as a single unit.

Keywords:

backward transition probability chunking individual differences inhibition lexical co-occurrence shifting

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Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience

Background:

Individual differences in cognitive abilities like memory and attention are common in language users.
Despite these differences, language comprehension is generally successful, suggesting varied processing strategies.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate individual differences in processing co-occurring words (bigrams).
To determine how cognitive abilities influence the reliance on word co-occurrence statistics versus chunked unit retrieval.

Main Methods:

A psycholinguistic self-paced reading experiment using modifier-noun bigrams.
Backward transition probability (BTP) quantified bigram prominence relative to individual word frequency.
Five individual difference measures assessed: processing speed, verbal working memory, cognitive inhibition, global-local shifting, and personality.

Main Results:

Cognitive inhibition and global-local shifting significantly modulated the effect of BTP on reading times.
Participants strong in cognitive inhibition and those preferring local-level processing showed greater sensitivity to co-occurrence probability.
This indicates individual differences in whether bigrams are processed via constituent parts or as holistic units.

Conclusions:

Individual cognitive traits influence how word bigrams are processed.
Some individuals rely more on co-occurrence statistics of word parts, while others retrieve bigrams as pre-compiled chunks.
This highlights distinct processing strategies employed by individuals for efficient language understanding.