The effects of age and level of education on the ability of adult native speakers of Dutch to segment speech into words

Abstract

This study tested Hulstijn’s (2011) hypothesis that adult native speakers share the ability to process every-day speech, although older people do so more slowly than younger people. In two segmentation tasks, segments of speech were presented consisting of two to four highly common words. In the Count Task, participants decided as quickly as possible how many words they had heard. In the Dictation Task, participants wrote down what they had heard. Participants (N = 235) were selected on the basis of their age (young vs senior) and level of education (low vs high). Some of the findings are at variance with the predictions, which may or may not have been caused by a task confound.

The ‘Comparative Logic’ and Why We Need to Explain Interlanguage Grammars

“…This suggest that NS should be matched with NNS of similar literacy levels. A similar argument has been made by Hulstijn and Andringa (2014) as they argue that it may not be possible to single out a single factor responsible for variation in their native control data as effects of working-memory capacity, reasoning ability and reactionspeed in a nonverbal task together could explain effects of age and length of exposure. In general, these and other studies investigating individual differences reach the conclusion that NS-NNS are legitimate as long as the right NS are included in terms of literacy, educational background, experience, background characteristics etc.…”

“…The control group and the experimental group need to be matched on a number of variables to ensure that they differ only with respect to the condition to be investigated. Since some variation in the behaviour of NS is expected, it is essential that both groups speak the same variety (i.e., be exposed to the same evidence available in the input) and have the same level of literacy (same educational background) and same background characteristics (see Dąbrowska, 2010 ; Hulstijn, 2011 ; Andringa et al, 2012 ; Hulstijn and Andringa, 2014 ). The challenge is to decide what group of NS to include for the comparison with NNS to be appropriate.…”

Predictions of Individual Differences in the Acquisition of Native and Non-Native Languages: An Update of BLC Theory

“…14 For an example of two speech-segmentation tasks, aiming at assessing solely BLC in native speakers of Dutch differing in age and level of education, see Hulstijn and Andringa (2014). Favier and Huettig (2021) designed a grammatical acceptability test with two sets of sentences: (1) sentences with grammatical constructions that a panel of 23 linguists had rated as "virtually known by all adult native speakers" (p. 3), called "core" items and (2) items that the panelists had rated as belonging to the "periphery" of grammar.…”