The Role of Cognitive Skills and Language Experience in Grammatical Processing

尽管掌握了基本的单词阅读技能，但大量读者仍在努力 理解他们读到的内容。更令人担忧的是少数族裔和低收入群体的比例过高。 在挣扎的读者队伍中的人口，这与糟糕的健康结果有关。同时 时间上，心理语言学家和教育研究人员对于哪些因素没有达成一致意见 推动语言理解的可变性。这项研究计划测试了两个因素， 主张解释语法处理能力和语言理解能力的变异性。第一 认知能力(即工作记忆、处理速度和语音)是否存在差异 能力)。第二个是语言体验上的差异。我们测试了这两种可能性 考察青少年读者语言理解的个体差异的一系列实验 和成年人。我们有两个具体的目标：1)确定句法加工是否受 认知限制或语言经验；2)确定语言之间的相关性 在试点工作中发现的经验和理解技能是之前 具有不同语法结构的经验，或来自以下方面的分析效率提高的结果 练习一下。拟议的实验结果对语言的核心问题有影响 研究。工作记忆或其他认知因素预测语言技能的证据最多 与认知领域的一般方面参与理解的理论一致 语言。语言经验预测阅读技能变异性的证据更符合 假设统计表示法驱动语言处理的理论。

Despite having mastered basic word reading skills, large numbers of readers struggle to understand what they read. More worrisome still is the over-representation of minority and low-income populations in the ranks of struggling readers, which is linked to poor health outcomes. At the same time, there is very little agreement among psycholinguists and education researchers as to what factors drive variability in language understanding. This research program tests two factors that have been argued to explain variability in grammatical processing and language comprehension abilities. The first are differences in cognitive abilities (i.e. working memory, processing speed, and phonological ability). The second are differences in experience with language. We test these two possibilities in a series of experiments examining individual differences in language comprehension in young readers and adults. We have 2 specific aims: 1) To determine whether syntactic processing is guided by cognitive constraints or language experience; 2) to determine whether correlations between language experience and comprehension skills that were discovered in pilot work are the result of previous experience with diverse grammatical structures or the result of improved parsing efficiency derived from practice. The outcomes of the proposed experiments have implications for core questions in language research. Evidence that working memory or other cognitive factors predict language skill is most consistent with theories that domain general aspects of cognition are engaged in understanding language. Evidence that language experience predicts variability in reading skill is more consistent with theories that posit that statistical representations drive language processing.