Long-term written language experience affects grammaticality judgements and usage but not priming of spoken sentences

Abstract

‘Book language’ offers a richer linguistic experience than conversational speech in terms of its syntactic properties. Here, we investigated the role of long-term syntactic experience on syntactic knowledge and processing. In a pre-registered study with 161 adult native Dutch speakers with varying levels of literacy, we assessed the contribution of individual differences in written language experience to offline and online syntactic processes. Offline syntactic knowledge was assessed as accuracy in an auditory grammaticality judgment task in which we tested violations of four Dutch grammatical norms. Online syntactic processing was indexed by syntactic priming of the Dutch dative alternation, using a comprehension-to-production priming paradigm with auditory presentation. Controlling for the contribution of non-verbal IQ, verbal working memory, and processing speed, we observed a robust effect of literacy experience on the detection of grammatical norm violations in spoken sentences, suggesting that exposure to the syntactic complexity and diversity of written language has specific benefits for general (modality-independent) syntactic knowledge. We replicated previous results by finding robust comprehension-to-production structural priming, both with and without lexical overlap between prime and target. Although literacy experience affected the usage of syntactic alternates in our large sample, it did not modulate their priming. We conclude that amount of experience with written language increases explicit awareness of grammatical norm violations and changes the usage of (PO vs. DO) dative spoken sentences but has no detectable effect on their implicit syntactic priming in proficient language users. These findings constrain theories about the effect of long-term experience on syntactic processing.

Book Language and Its Implications for Children’s Language, Literacy, and Development

“…Print exposure has beneficial effects beyond those for vocabulary, however. It also correlates with how well adults deal with spoken language in tasks tapping sentence comprehension and grammaticality judgment (e.g., Da˛browska, 2018; Favier & Huetigg, 2021).…”

Literacy can enhance syntactic prediction in spoken language processing.

“…Thirty-eight native Dutch speakers volunteered to participate in the experiment ( M age = 25.2 years; 25 female). We recruited from a pool of 161 participants with varying degrees of literacy experience who had completed a battery of individual difference measures as part of a different study (Favier & Huettig, in press). We performed a preregistered principal components analysis on six literacy measures (receptive vocabulary, author recognition, reading habits, spelling, word, and pseudoword reading) to derive an underlying construct that explained the maximal amount of variance in the literacy data (literacy PC1 in Table 1).…”

Using Psychometric Network Analysis to Examine the Components of Spoken Word Recognition

“…To assess participants' knowledge of Dutch prescriptive grammar, a recently developed grammaticality judgment test (Favier & Huettig, 2021) was used. Participants heard spoken sentences and indicated for each of them whether they thought it was a correct Dutch sentence.…”