Sentence Processing in Context: The Impact of Experience on Individual Differences

There exists considerable variation, at the level of the individual, in human sentence processing performance. Here, we aim to illuminate the degree to which experience with language can account for these individual differences. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that subtle interactions between specific verbs and preceding linguistic context can drive reading times on complex sentences, but only in participants with a high amount of reading experience. Experiment 2 demonstrates, psychometrically, that traditional reading span tasks seem to measure language processing skill, heavily influenced by experience with language, instead of a verbal working memory capacity. In combination, these results support the idea that reading span measures and sentence processing tasks are tapping into the same underlying skill, and crucially, that this skill is determined, primarily, by experience.