Saoradh Favier will defend her thesis Thursday 10th of December 2020

Link to live-stream

Young people in the Netherlands appear to be reading less and less. While educators, parents, and policy makers agree that all of us should read more, not much is understood about the ongoing benefits of reading for other language skills in adulthood, especially when it comes to grammatical proficiency. Saoradh Favier’s research shone a spotlight on Dutch native speakers’ grammatical proficiency and explored the role that life-long reading experience might play in determining individual differences. Taken together, her findings suggest that increased exposure to ‘book language’ may have some benefits for grammatical proficiency. Most excitingly, she found preliminary evidence that people who read more are better at using grammatical cues to anticipate upcoming words while listening to speech. Being able to anticipate what’s coming next is thought to make language comprehension easier and more efficient.