Familial Handedness and Access to Words, Meaning, and Syntax during Sentence Comprehension |
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Authors: | David J. Townsend Caroline Carrithers Thomas G. Bever |
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Affiliation: | Department of Psychology, Montclair State University, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043, USA. townsendd@mail.montclair.edu |
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Abstract: | We compared right-handed familial dextral (FS-) and familial sinistral (FS+) participants who were aged either 10-13 years (children) or 18-23 years (adults). In word probe and associative probe tasks, FS+ adults responded faster than all other groups and FS+ children responded more slowly than all other groups. In the word probe task, only the FS- adults showed a significant effect of the serial position of the target word. We interpret these differences to support an analysis-by-synthesis model of comprehension in which individuals who differ in familial handedness and age emphasize different linguistic representations during comprehension. In general, FS+ individuals focus on words and meaning, while FS- individuals focus on syntactic representations. In FS+ individuals, age-related experiences with language produce a shift in responding from compositional meaning to words and their associations. In FS- individuals, age-related experiences with language produce a shift toward responding based more on detailed syntactic representations, including the serial order of words and possibly the structural roles of clauses. |
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Keywords: | Key Words: sentence comprehension language acquisition cerebral asymmetries individual differences |
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