Individual differences in online research: Comparing lab-based and online administration of a psycholinguistic battery of linguistic and domain-general skills.

Experimental psychologists and psycholinguists increasingly turn to online research for data collection due to the ease of sampling many diverse participants in parallel. Online research has shown promising validity and consistency, but is it suitable for all paradigms? Specifically, is it reliable enough for individual differences research? The current paper reports performance on 15 tasks from a psycholinguistic individual differences battery, including timed and untimed assessments of linguistic abilities, as well as domain-general skills. From a demographically homogenous sample of young Dutch people, 149 participants participated in the lab study, and 515 participated online.

Lexical Surprisal Shapes the Time Course of Syntactic Structure Building.

When we understand language, we recognize words and combine them into sentences. In this article, we explore the hypothesis that listeners use probabilistic information about words to build syntactic structure. Recent work has shown that lexical probability and syntactic structure both modulate the delta-band (<4 Hz) neural signal.

Semantic interference across word classes during lexical selection in Dutch.

When producing a sentence, speakers must rapidly select appropriate words in the correct order. Models of lexical access often assume that this lexical selection process is competitive and that each word is chosen from a set of competing candidates. Therefore, an important theoretical issue is which factors constrain this choice.

The influence of familiarisation and item repetition on the name agreement effect in picture naming.

Name agreement (NA) refers to the degree to which speakers agree on a picture's name. A robust finding is that speakers are faster to name pictures with high agreement (HA) than those with low agreement (LA). This NA effect is thought to occur because LA pictures strongly activate several names, so speakers need time to select one.

Audiovisual Perception of Lexical Stress: Beat Gestures and Articulatory Cues.

Human communication is inherently multimodal. Auditory speech, but also visual cues can be used to understand another talker. Most studies of audiovisual speech perception have focused on the perception of speech segments (i.

Using Psychometric Network Analysis to Examine the Components of Spoken Word Recognition.

Using language requires access to domain-specific linguistic representations, but also draws on domain-general cognitive skills. A key issue in current psycholinguistics is to situate linguistic processing in the network of human cognitive abilities. Here, we focused on spoken word recognition and used an individual differences approach to examine the links of scores in word recognition tasks with scores on tasks capturing effects of linguistic experience, general processing speed, working memory, and non-verbal reasoning.

In conversation, answers are remembered better than the questions themselves.

Language is used in communicative contexts to identify and successfully transmit new information that should be later remembered. In three studies, we used question-answer pairs, a naturalistic device for focusing information, to examine how properties of conversations inform later item memory. In Experiment 1, participants viewed three pictures while listening to a recorded question-answer exchange between two people about the locations of two of the displayed pictures.

Word frequency has similar effects in picture naming and gender decision: A failure to replicate Jescheniak and Levelt (1994).

Word frequency plays a key role in theories of lexical access, which assume that the word frequency effect (WFE, faster access to high-frequency than low-frequency words) occurs as a result of differences in the representation and processing of the words. In a seminal paper, Jescheniak and Levelt (1994) proposed that the WFE arises during the retrieval of word forms, rather than the retrieval of their syntactic representations (their lemmas) or articulatory commands. An important part of Jescheniak and Levelt's argument was that they found a stable WFE in a picture naming task, which requires complete lexical access, but not in a gender decision task, which only requires access to the words' lemmas and not their word forms.

IDLaS-NL - A platform for running customized studies on individual differences in Dutch language skills via the Internet.

We introduce the Individual Differences in Language Skills (IDLaS-NL) web platform, which enables users to run studies on individual differences in Dutch language skills via the Internet. IDLaS-NL consists of 35 behavioral tests, previously validated in participants aged between 18 and 30 years. The platform provides an intuitive graphical interface for users to select the tests they wish to include in their research, to divide these tests into different sessions and to determine their order.

Delta-Band Neural Responses to Individual Words Are Modulated by Sentence Processing.

To understand language, we need to recognize words and combine them into phrases and sentences. During this process, responses to the words themselves are changed. In a step toward understanding how the brain builds sentence structure, the present study concerns the neural readout of this adaptation.

Timing in Conversation.

Turn-taking in everyday conversation is fast, with median latencies in corpora of conversational speech often reported to be under 300 ms. This seems like magic, given that experimental research on speech planning has shown that speakers need much more time to plan and produce even the shortest of utterances. This paper reviews how language scientists have combined linguistic analyses of conversations and experimental work to understand the skill of swift turn-taking and proposes a tentative solution to the riddle of fast turn-taking.

Polypill Strategy in Secondary Cardiovascular Prevention.

Background: A polypill that includes key medications associated with improved outcomes (aspirin, angiotensin-converting-enzyme [ACE] inhibitor, and statin) has been proposed as a simple approach to the secondary prevention of cardiovascular death and complications after myocardial infarction.

Methods: In this phase 3, randomized, controlled clinical trial, we assigned patients with myocardial infarction within the previous 6 months to a polypill-based strategy or usual care. The polypill treatment consisted of aspirin (100 mg), ramipril (2.

Neural dynamics differentially encode phrases and sentences during spoken language comprehension.

Human language stands out in the natural world as a biological signal that uses a structured system to combine the meanings of small linguistic units (e.g., words) into larger constituents (e.

Correction: Protocol of the Healthy Brain Study: An accessible resource for understanding the human brain and how it dynamically and individually operates in its bio-social context.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Overrated gaps: Inter-speaker gaps provide limited information about the timing of turns in conversation.

Corpus analyses have shown that turn-taking in conversation is much faster than laboratory studies of speech planning would predict. To explain fast turn-taking, Levinson and Torreira (2015) proposed that speakers are highly proactive: They begin to plan a response to their interlocutor's turn as soon as they have understood its gist, and launch this planned response when the turn-end is imminent. Thus, fast turn-taking is possible because speakers use the time while their partner is talking to plan their own utterance.

Protocol of the Healthy Brain Study: An accessible resource for understanding the human brain and how it dynamically and individually operates in its bio-social context.

The endeavor to understand the human brain has seen more progress in the last few decades than in the previous two millennia. Still, our understanding of how the human brain relates to behavior in the real world and how this link is modulated by biological, social, and environmental factors is limited. To address this, we designed the Healthy Brain Study (HBS), an interdisciplinary, longitudinal, cohort study based on multidimensional, dynamic assessments in both the laboratory and the real world.

Competition Reduces Response Times in Multiparty Conversation.

Natural conversations are characterized by short transition times between turns. This holds in particular for multi-party conversations. The short turn transitions in everyday conversations contrast sharply with the much longer speech onset latencies observed in laboratory studies where speakers respond to spoken utterances.

Literacy can enhance syntactic prediction in spoken language processing.

Language comprehenders can use syntactic cues to generate predictions online about upcoming language. Previous research with reading-impaired adults and healthy, low-proficiency adult and child learners suggests that reading skills are related to prediction in spoken language comprehension. Here, we investigated whether differences in literacy are also related to predictive spoken language processing in non-reading-impaired proficient adult readers with varying levels of literacy experience.

Aging affects steaks more than knives: Evidence that the processing of words related to motor skills is relatively spared in aging.

Lexical-processing declines are a hallmark of aging. However, the extent of these declines may vary as a function of different factors. Motivated by findings from neurodegenerative diseases and healthy aging, we tested whether 'motor-relatedness' (the degree to which words are associated with particular human body movements) might moderate such declines.

Planning when to say: Dissociating cue use in utterance initiation using cross-validation.

In conversation, turns follow each other with minimal gaps. To achieve this, speakers must launch their utterances shortly before the predicted end of the partner's turn. We examined the relative importance of cues to partner utterance content and partner utterance length for launching coordinated speech.

Modeling the distributional dynamics of attention and semantic interference in word production.

In recent years, it has become clear that attention plays an important role in spoken word production. Some of this evidence comes from distributional analyses of reaction time (RT) in regular picture naming and picture-word interference. Yet we lack a mechanistic account of how the properties of RT distributions come to reflect attentional processes and how these processes may in turn modulate the amount of conflict between lexical representations.

What makes a language easy to learn? A preregistered study on how systematic structure and community size affect language learnability.

Cross-linguistic differences in morphological complexity could have important consequences for language learning. Specifically, it is often assumed that languages with more regular, compositional, and transparent grammars are easier to learn by both children and adults. Moreover, it has been shown that such grammars are more likely to evolve in bigger communities.

A behavioural dataset for studying individual differences in language skills.

This resource contains data from 112 Dutch adults (18-29 years of age) who completed the Individual Differences in Language Skills test battery that included 33 behavioural tests assessing language skills and domain-general cognitive skills likely involved in language tasks. The battery included tests measuring linguistic experience (e.g.

Forgotten Little Words: How Backchannels and Particles May Facilitate Speech Planning in Conversation?

In everyday conversation, turns often follow each other immediately or overlap in time. It has been proposed that speakers achieve this tight temporal coordination between their turns by engaging in linguistic dual-tasking, i.e.