Speakers of a common language must share substantial parts of their grammatical and lexical knowledge; otherwise they would not understand each other. It is reasonable to assume that the shared linguistic knowledge is represented and accessed in similar ways by all speakers. Linguistic and psycholinguistic research has typically been directed at uncovering these commonalties between people. However, in everyday conversations we can observe marked differences in the way people express themselves, for instance in their speech rate and fluency, word choice and utterance complexity. There are also striking differences in people’s ability to understand spoken language, especially under unfavorable conditions. In psycholinguistic experiments, we also find that participants differ in their performance, for instance in their processing speed or accuracy, or in the sizes of experimental effects.

Aims of the project

The first aim of the project is to describe how healthy adults differ in the way they comprehend and produce spoken utterances. Although differences among adult speakers and listeners are noticeable in everyday life, experimental psycholinguists have largely ignored them, focusing instead on the average speaker/listener. Moreover, most experimental research has been carried out with university students as participants. Given that student samples are likely to be more homogeneous in their cognitive and linguistic abilities than the general population, very little is known about the ways people differ in producing and understanding utterances. Our first aim then is to determine in which tasks and situations adult speakers and listeners differ substantially in their performance and where performance differences are minimal.

The second aim of the project is to explain how similarities and differences between speakers and listeners arise. It is likely that performance differences in linguistic tasks such as describing a scene or understanding complex sentences are due to the joint effects of several general cognitive and specific linguistic factors. We aim to determine what these factors are and how much of the observed variability each of them explains.

Approach

The theoretical work starts from established models of core aspects of listening and speaking. From such models, we derive hypotheses about causes of individual differences in specific tasks, such as picture naming, understanding or producing compounds, or selecting contextually appropriate referring expressions (e.g., a noun or a pronoun). These hypotheses can concern parameters of a model (e.g., the speed of activation or decay), the listeners' or speakers' preferences for particular processing strategies, or the involvement of general cognitive processes (such as the control of attention or working memory) in linguistic tasks.

To evaluate these hypotheses, we often test the same participants in several experiments and standardized tests (e.g., in a picture naming and a lexical decision experiment and in tests of processing speed and verbal working memory) and examine their performance profiles and the correlations between the scores achieved in different tasks. Importantly, we do no work exclusively with student participants, but for most studies invite heterogeneous samples of participants, recruited primarily through newspaper advertisements.

Gain

The project is motivated by our curiosity about the different ways people process language. A key theoretical issue is whether individual differences in linguistic performance are primarily due to differences in domain-general processes or whether there are also substantial differences in specific linguistic abilities or skills between adult speakers of a language. In addition, the research should allow us to determine whether and how the existing, primarily student-based processing models need to be modified to account for the behavior of a broader group of language users. Finally we should gain new insights into the relationships between cognitive components, for instance about the involvement of working memory or executive control processes in speech planning. Currently, most of the work in the project concerns the way adults comprehend and produce utterances in their first language. Extensions to second language processing and the development of language are planned.

Selected subprojects

• Developing a screening tool for linguistic skills (Lesya Ganushchak, Dan Dediu, Antje Meyer, Simon Fisher, Stephen Levinson)
• Planning scope in the production of simple utterances (Agnieszka Konopka, Antje Meyer)
• Individual differences in language-mediated prediction abilities (Falk Huettig)
• Effects of formal literacy on cognitive processing (Falk Huettig, Ramesh Mishra (University of Allahabad))
• Artificial grammar learning (Loan Vuong, Morten Christiansen (Cornell University), Antje Meyer)
• Choice of referring expressions (Alma Veenstra, Dan Acheson, Antje Meyer)
• Accessing morphologically complex words (Jana Reifegerste, Antje Meyer)
• Efficiency of lexical access: Effects of lexical knowledge and executive control (Zeshu Shao, Ardi Roelofs (Radboud University Nijmegen), Antje Meyer)
• Flexibility and incrementality in message and sentence formulation (Maartje van de Velde, Agnieszka Konopka, Antje Meyer)

Related research

• Speech comprehension during speech planning. (Blaire Morgan, Andrew Olson (University of Birmingham), Antje Meyer)

• Individual differences in gesture production. ESRC project, (Mingyan Chu, Sotaro Kita (PI, University of Birmingham), Antje Meyer)

• What makes a good listener? Correlates of speech-comprehension ability in young and older adults.VIDI project, (Esther Janse (Center for Language Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen))

• Processing of poetry (Francesca Stregapede, Chris Miall (University of Birmingham), Antje Meyer)
• Get the focus right: A cross-linguistic study on prosodic encoding of focus in children. VIDI project (Ajou Chen (Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University))
• Flexible ears: How adaptable is the speech recognition system of older listeners? (Odette Scharenborg (MaxNetAging Research School))