The Effects of Individual Differences in Text Exposure on Grammatical Processing

This project investigates the factors that influence how humans speak and understand language. It looks at the impact of the specific language that an individual encounters in day-to-day life (i.e., specific websites, videos, books, magazines, and social media), as well as factors like memory, the speed with which information is processed, and the ability to mentally track ideas. Understanding how each of these factors influence language processing and language learning informs an understanding of how humans learn language, with the translational potential of developing more effective methods of language acquisition. The goal of this project is to gain a better understanding of how an individual's experience with language affects language processing abilities. Factors like reading habits, exposure to different types of text, and cognitive abilities (such as working memory, attention, and processing speed) are measured to determine how each factor influences an individual's preferences and performance when processing complex English sentence structures. Although the scientific literature suggests that speakers are extremely sensitive to the linguistic frequency of grammatical structures and words in a language, how exactly frequency is used is unclear. Some work proposes that speakers' linguistic preferences match the frequency with which they encounter these structures in day-to-day life, but more recent findings suggest that people with more experience with language are more flexible in their language preferences. The project will involve two main experiments. The first experiment assesses how much experience with language, as measured by self-reported reading habits and the characteristics of the texts that participants read online, impacts preferences for dative sentences and phrasal verbs. The second experiment examines how reading experience and cognitive abilities interact to influence how quickly and accurately participants process sentences with complex syntactic structures. The findings help inform language teaching practices and help to develop interventions that better support learners based on their unique experiences and cognitive profiles. This project is jointly funded by the Perception, Action, and Cognition (PAC) program and the Linguistics (LING) program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.