Talk Title: Individual differences in
syntactic processing:
A psycholinguist's
"two-disciplines" problem
Abstract:
There remains little consensus about whether there exist meaningful individual differences in syntactic processing and, if so, what explains them. In this talk, we will describe a study that we completed with our colleagues in which we replicated three major syntactic phenomena in the psycholinguistic literature: use of verb distributional statistics, difficulty of object- versus subject-extracted relative clauses, and resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguities. We examined whether any individual differences in these phenomena could be predicted by language experience or general cognitive abilities (phonological ability, verbal working memory capacity, inhibitory control, perceptual speed). We found correlations between individual differences and offline, but not online, syntactic phenomena. Condition effects on reading time were not consistent within individuals, limiting their ability to correlate with other measures. We will discuss these findings in the context of Cronbach's "two disciplines" problem of combining experimental and correlational approaches.