A learning perspective on individual differences in skilled reading: Exploring and exploiting orthographic and semantic discrimination cues.

Abstract

The goal of the present study is to understand the role orthographic and semantic information play in the behaviour of skilled readers. Reading latencies from a self-paced sentence reading experiment in which Russian near-synonymous verbs were manipulated appear well-predicted by a combination of bottom-up sub-lexical letter triplets (trigraphs) and top-down semantic generalizations, modelled using the Naive Discrimination Learner. The results reveal a complex interplay of bottom-up and top-down support from orthography and semantics to the target verbs, whereby activations from orthography only are modulated by individual differences. Using performance on a serial reaction time task for a novel operationalization of the mental speed hypothesis, we explain the observed individual differences in reading behaviour in terms of the exploration/exploitation hypothesis from Reinforcement Learning, where initially slower and more variable behaviour leads to better performance overall.

Individual Differences in Language Acquisition and Processing

“…The link is also attested in adults, and appears most strongly in tasks involving predictability; for instance, in predicting likely continuations of sentences in context [109] or in grammatical sequencing [110][111][112]. Similar effects have been observed in adult readers' use of orthographic cues for lexical access during reading [132]. Box 1 provides a more in-depth overview of the relationship between SL and language.…”

“…Specifically, SL is suggested to provide a potentially powerful mechanism with which children can acquire language from input without strong assumptions about innateness (although see [16]). More recently, the field has attempted to quantify IDs in SL, and has linked these to language proficiency in children and adults [105][106][107][108][109][110][111][112]132]. This work has shown some promise, with mostly medium-positive associations between SL and language typically reported [133].…”

Exploring and Exploiting Uncertainty: Statistical Learning Ability Affects How We Learn to Process Language Along Multiple Dimensions of Experience

“…In this paper, we link research on the effects of pattern learning on language processing to research on the alignment of desirable learning strategies across tasks. We build on previous work by Milin, Divjak, and Baayen (2017) to demonstrate how individual differences in pattern learning correlate with skilled readers' handling of morphological and syntactic co‐occurrence patterns and how these differences are reflected in their exploration and exploitation of content‐ and task‐related patterns. More specifically, we test three hypotheses: learning non‐linguistic and linguistic sequences relies on the same mechanism (Section 3.1); individuals differ in their pattern learning and this is reflected in how they read morphological and syntactic patterns (Section 3.2); depending on their pattern learning, individuals differ in their readiness to explore and exploit the environment in order to adapt to the task and improve their performance (Section 3.3).…”

“…Instead, we focus on the effect that an individual's statistical learning has on aspects of learned linguistic performance. Specifically, our study builds on previous work (Milin et al, 2017) that links linguistic performance to the exploration/exploitation hypothesis from Reinforcement Learning (RL).…”

“…For learnable aspects of language behavior, specifically, one question seems to be of crucial importance: Do particularly successful learning strategies show up in different guises across learning contexts? Previous work (Milin et al, 2017) has provided indirect evidence for the alignment of desirable learning strategies that encourage pattern learning across tasks. Participants' engagement with a (reading) task correlated with the mental speed with which they approached a sequence learning task and the information they had at their disposal.…”