Experience and sentence processing: Statistical learning and relative clause comprehension

• Published in: Cognitive psychology Vol. 58; no. 2; pp. 250 - 271
• Main Authors: Wells, Justine B., Christiansen, Morten H., Race, David S., Acheson, Daniel J., MacDonald, Maryellen C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier Inc 01.03.2009; Elsevier; Academic Press
• Subjects: Adult; Adults; Biological and medical sciences; Cognitive Processes; Cognitive psychology; Comprehension; Computation; Control Groups; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Grammar; Human; Humans; Individual Differences; Information processing; Language; Language Processing; Learning; Learning. Memory; Memory; Memory, Short-Term; Probability; Production and perception of written language; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reading; Reading Comprehension; Reading Processes; Reading Rate; Reading Skills; Relative Clauses; Sentence processing; Sentence Structure; Sentences; Short Term Memory; Statistical learning; Studies; Syntactic Processing; Wisconsin; Word Order; Working memory; Wisconsin; Sentence processing; Working memory; Statistical learning; Relative clauses; Individual differences; Human; Cognition; Experimental study; Reading; Acquisition process; Language; Interindividual comparison; Sentence
• ISSN: 0010-0285; 1095-5623; 1095-5623
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2008.08.002

Many explanations of the difficulties associated with interpreting object relative clauses appeal to the demands that object relatives make on working memory. MacDonald and Christiansen [MacDonald, M. C., & Christiansen, M. H. (2002). Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996). Psychological Review, 109, 35–54] pointed to variations in reading experience as a source of differences, arguing that the unique word order of object relatives makes their processing more difficult and more sensitive to the effects of previous experience than the processing of subject relatives. This hypothesis was tested in a large-scale study manipulating reading experiences of adults over several weeks. The group receiving relative clause experience increased reading speeds for object relatives more than for subject relatives, whereas a control experience group did not. The reading time data were compared to performance of a computational model given different amounts of experience. The results support claims for experience-based individual differences and an important role for statistical learning in sentence comprehension processes.