Individual Differences in Holistic and Compositional Language Processing

Abstract

Individual differences in cognitive abilities are ubiquitous across the spectrum of proficient language users. Although speakers differ with regard to their memory capacity, ability for inhibiting distraction, and ability to shift between different processing levels, comprehension is generally successful. However, this does not mean it is identical across individuals; listeners and readers may rely on different processing strategies to exploit distributional information in the service of efficient understanding. In the following psycholinguistic reading experiment, we investigate potential sources of individual differences in the processing of co-occurring words. Participants read modifier-noun bigrams like absolute silence in a self-paced reading task. Backward transition probability (BTP) between the two lexemes was used to quantify the prominence of the bigram as a whole in comparison to the frequency of its parts. Of five individual difference measures (processing speed, verbal working memory, cognitive inhibition, global-local scope shifting, and personality), two proved to be significantly associated with the effect of BTP on reading times. Participants who could inhibit a distracting global environment in order to more efficiently retrieve a single part and those that preferred the local level in the shifting task showed greater effects of the co-occurrence probability of the parts. We conclude that some participants are more likely to retrieve bigrams via their parts and their co-occurrence statistics whereas others more readily retrieve the two words together as a single chunked unit.

Individual differences in online research: Comparing lab-based and online administration of a psycholinguistic battery of linguistic and domain-general skills

“…Data collected online from many of the most common psychological and linguistic paradigms confirm that results from participants tested online are comparable to those from in-lab samples (Crump et al, 2013;Germine et al, 2012;Hilbig, 2016;Miller et al, 2018Miller et al, , 2018Patterson & Nicklin, 2023;Semmelmann & Weigelt, 2017). The advantages of online testing are particularly relevant for individual differences studies, which are growing in popularity (Engelhardt et al, 2017;Isbilen et al, 2022;Kidd et al, 2018Kidd et al, , 2023McConnell, 2023; paradigms rely on stable estimation of participant ability and thus must detect what group-level designs can safely level out, and it is unclear if research collected online can meet this standard (Hedge et al, 2018).…”

“…Large, stable, and group-level effects seem to replicate well online. However, there is an increasing interest in psychology and psycholinguistics in differences between individuals and their causes (Dąbrowska, 2012;Engelhardt et al, 2017;Isbilen et al, 2022;Kidd et al, 2018Kidd et al, , 2023McConnell, 2023;McConnell & Blumenthal-Dramé, 2021;Payne et al, 2014;Pronk et al, 2022). Yet individual difference paradigms may face unique challenges when moved to an online lab.…”