Literacy improves the comprehension of object relatives

Dąbrowska, Ewa; Pascual, Esther; Gómez-Estern, Beatriz Macías

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104958

Cited by 13 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…A similar finding was demonstrated in Dąbrowska (2018) in which she found that well-into adulthood, L1 English speakers displayed statistically significant correlations between vocabulary, collocations, and grammar, and print exposure. Similarly, the results of this study also contribute to the argument that not all L1 speakers converge on the same grammar, and some show differences as a result of literacy (e.g., Dąbrowska, 2018;Dąbrowska, Pascual & Gómez-Estern, 2022;Street & Dąbrowska, 2014;Huettig & Pickering, 2019). If all speakers, in this case L1 adult Turkish speakers, had converged on the same morphosyntactic generalization, then there would have been no correlations or variance accounted for by print exposure.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 60%

“…For instance, Dąbrowska (2008) shows that L1 Polish speakers displayed varying levels of rule extraction for the Polish dative, and speakers that read more in Polish appeared to extract an across-the-board rule, whereas those that do not read as much extract local generalizations that only apply to a certain class of nouns, and gender. This has been argued to be a result of the facilitatory effect of print exposure, because written language contains more varied language than spoken language (e.g., Roland, Dick, & Elman, 2007), and enhances linguistic knowledge in L1 on various levels, e.g., vocabulary (e.g., Stanovich & Cunningham, 1992), collocations (Dąbrowska, 2014(Dąbrowska, , 2018, morphosyntax (Dąbrowska, Pascual & Gómez-Estern, 2022;Dąbrowska, 2018;Street, 2017Street, , 2020, and production of passives, subject and object relatives (Montag & MacDonald, 2015). Indeed, L1 Turkish speakers also show IDs in their grammatical knowledge.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Interestingly, there is evidence that humans differ in their cognitive machinery drastically due to socioeconomic factors such as nutrition, diet, stress as well as genetic factors (Gruszka et al, 2010). For instance, nonverbal IQ, which appears to be correlated with language skills in L1 up to a certain extent (e.g., Dąbrowska, 2018;Dąbrowska, Pascual & Gómez-Estern, 2022), is heavily influenced by nutrition, diet and stress (Lervag et al, 2019). Thus, differences in this machinery should theoretically result in differences in the representation of linguistic knowledge.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Individual Differences in the Turkish Aorist

Gedik¹

2023

Preprint

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Several studies have established that not all native speakers extract the same generalization for a given construction due to speaker internal or external reasons, challenging a widely held assumption. While there is a considerable number of studies investigating individual differences in grammatical knowledge, very little is known about how L1 Turkish speakers might manifest such differences in their linguistic knowledge. This is the first study to examine individual differences in the constructional representation of the Turkish aorist in adult L1 Turkish speakers. The aorist is known to be irregular and pose acquisition problems, especially when combined with monosyllabic sonorant ending verbs. The variants of the Turkish aorist have different corpus frequencies across spoken and written modalities. The study investigates to what extent differences in print exposure would lead to differences in how L1 Turkish speakers would apply the construction to monosyllabic-sonorant ending nonce-verbs. Based on the results, people with more written language experience extracted a more sensitive rule that applies to monosyllabic-sonorant ending nonce-verbs, and such people produced more -Ir than -Ar. Contrastingly, people who read less used more -Ar (r= -.35), and print exposure accounted for roughly 12% of the variance. Our findings are compatible with usage-based approaches, and suggest that print exposure-borne differences are pervasive in linguistic knowledge adding to the growing body of evidence that challenge the convergence hypothesis.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 60%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Individual Differences in the Turkish Aorist

Gedik¹

2023

Preprint

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“…Conversely, CR is the main factor that explains the participants’ performance on canonical and noncanonical sentences in the concurrent condition. Recent evidence has linked literacy with the comprehension of complex sentences [ 50 ], probably because it favours experience with this kind of material [ 51 ]. In this regard, education and reading experience, as contributors to CR, might contribute to facilitating interpretive processing [ 20 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Task Demands and Sentence Reading Comprehension among Healthy Older Adults: The Complementary Roles of Cognitive Reserve and Working Memory

et al. 2023

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Ageing entails different functional brain changes. Education, reading experience, and leisure activities, among others, might contribute to the maintenance of cognitive performance among older adults and are conceptualised as proxies for cognitive reserve. However, ageing also conveys a depletion of working memory capacity, which adversely impacts language comprehension. This study investigated how cognitive reserve proxies and working memory jointly predict the performance of healthy older adults in a sentence reading comprehension task, and how their predictive value changes depending on sentence structure and task demands. Cognitively healthy older adults (n = 120) completed a sentence–picture verification task under two conditions: concurrent viewing of the sentence and picture or their sequential presentation, thereby imposing greater demands on working memory. They also completed a questionnaire on cognitive reserve proxies as well as a verbal working memory test. The sentence structure was manipulated by altering the canonical word order and modifying the amount of propositional information. While the cognitive reserve was the main predictor in the concurrent condition, the predictive role of working memory increased under the sequential presentation, particularly for complex sentences. These findings highlight the complementary roles played by cognitive reserve and working memory in the reading comprehension of older adults.

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“…(2) The relative clause comprehension task (discussed inDąbrowska et al, 2022);(3) Nonce-verb production; (4) Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices (CPM).…”

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confidence: 99%

Literacy-related differences in morphological knowledge: A nonce-word study

et al. 2023

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Using a nonce-word inflection task, we examine the morphosyntactic productivity of adult native speakers of Spanish who are either beginning to learn to read and write (semi-literates) or have acquired literacy in late adulthood (late-literates), as well as age-matched controls (high-literates). High-literates consistently provided the appropriate form more often than late-literates, who in turn were better than semi-literate participants. Crucially, group interacted with person, number, and conjugation, such that the between-group differences were larger for the less frequent cells in the paradigm, indicating that literacy-related differences are not merely a consequence of the high-literacy group being more engaged or test-wise. This suggests that the availability of written representations may facilitate the acquisition of certain aspects of grammar. We also observed vast individual differences in productivity with inflectional endings. These results add to the growing body of research which challenges the assumption that all native speakers converge on the same grammar early in development.

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Literacy improves the comprehension of object relatives

Cited by 13 publications

References 55 publications

Individual Differences in the Turkish Aorist

Individual Differences in the Turkish Aorist

Task Demands and Sentence Reading Comprehension among Healthy Older Adults: The Complementary Roles of Cognitive Reserve and Working Memory

Literacy-related differences in morphological knowledge: A nonce-word study

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