Studying individual differences in the social environment to better understand language learning and processing

Abstract

People learn language from their social environment. Therefore, individual differences in the input that their social environment provides could influence their linguistic performance. Nevertheless, investigation of the role of individual differences in input on performance has been mostly restricted to first and second language acquisition. In this paper I argue that individual differences in input can influence linguistic performance even in adult native speakers. Specifically, differences in input can affect performance by influencing people's knowledgebase, by modulating their processing manner, and by shaping expectations. Therefore, studying the role that individual differences in input play can improve our understanding of how language is learned, processed and represented.Keywords: individual differences, social networks, PsychLingvarOne of the main goals of psycholinguistic research is to understand how we make sense of incoming input and manage to transform it into meaningful utterances. On the face of it, this is a task that most of us seem to succeed at, yet a closer look reveals great variation in the degree of success at different aspects of the task, from speech perception to the comprehension of pragmatic intentions. So far, the study of individual differences in language processing has mostly focused on differences due to variation in cognitive skills. Much less attention has been devoted to individual differences in the social environment, and in particular, to differences in the properties of the input it provides, especially among adult native speakers. In this paper, I argue that the characteristics of the input that people receive play an important role in shaping their linguistic performance. I will focus on three manners by which input can do so: by influencing the knowledgebase that feeds the analysis of incoming language, by influencing the manner of processing, such as the mechanisms that are relied on and the cues that are attended to during language processing, and by shaping expectations, which, in turn, influence performance. From noise to structured differencesThe realization that individual differences in performance can be informative about language processing and representation and are not merely noise that needs to be reduced has only gained popularity in Psycholinguistics over the last couple of decades. For many decades, experimental studies in psycholinguistics, as well as in other fields, focused on the commonalities, on how people in general perform certain tasks, and how the average participant is influenced by certain manipulations. Individual differences in performance were treated as noise. After all, by definition, participants' score on any task is composed of their "true" score and the measurement error, and so differences might simply be noise. If the experiment is conducted well, the measurement errors should cancel each other, and the general trend would be discovered. It is only in the 90s that the systematicity in this "noise" has started to be explo...

The Application of Implicit Stratified Teaching to English Reading Teaching in Junior Middle School

“…Students are in the center of teaching, teacher should pay attention to the development of students. Before implement student stratification, it is necessary for the teacher to analyze students' Zone of Proximal Development [3] (Lev-Ari, 2016). Therefore, the student stratification should be based on the students' Zone of Proximal Development, and the setting of teaching objectives and teaching activities should be consistent with the students' Zone of Proximal Development.…”