Key Takeaways from the Project

Background

Language experience plays an important role in theories of online sentence processing; evidence for this comes from the experimental manipulation of recent experience (e.g. syntactic priming) as well as the measurement of existing exposure to linguistic input (e.g. Langlois & Arnold, 2020; Payne et al., 2014; Mishra et al., 2012). Conceptually, “language experience” is broad, overlapping with–but not identical to–formal literacy.

Research Question

This broad scope raises challenges: what kind of language experience matters, when does it matter, and how should it be measured?

Measures

The tested battery of tasks (i.e. the fab 5) includes:

  1. Author Recognition Test (Stanovich & West, 1989; Acheson, Wells, & MacDonald, 2008)
    • How many of the provided authors do participants recognize?
  2. Extended Range Vocabulary Test (Ekstrom et al., 1976)
    • Multiple choice vocabulary test
  3. North American Adult Reading Test (Blair & Spreen, 1989)
    • Do participants know how to pronounce the presented words?
  4. Comparative Reading Habits (Acheson et al., 2008)
    • Likert scale measure in which people judge their reading ability and habits compared to other people their age.
  5. Reading Time Estimate (Acheson et al., 2008)
    • How much time do you spend reading (different types of material, such as textbooks, fiction books, nonfiction books, etc.)?

Results

  1. The fab 5 capture something about language experience.
  2. The fab components are moderately related to each other.
  3. Fab 5 language experience measures relate to sentence comprehension and fixation latencies in the visual world, accounting for other cognitive measures.
  4. However, condition effects as measures of individual differences are not necessarily reliable.

Next:

In Part 2 click here for the post (April 12) Dr. James will lead discussion about this project, including more information about ongoing work to

  1. uncover the quirks and limitations of these tasks
  2. explore the possibilities of alternative measurement strategies
  3. hopefully build toward a deeper understanding of what “language experience” means.

Video

Click below to view the discussion on Youtube.

Click here!