TY - JOUR
T1 - Familial handedness and access to words, meaning, and syntax during sentence comprehension
AU - Townsend, David J.
AU - Carrithers, Caroline
AU - Bever, Thomas G.
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by grants from the National Institute of Education and Montclair State University. Beth De Forest, Jeff Keller, and Vickie Larsen assisted in scoring results. We are grateful to Ms. Gertrude Goldstein at the Woodward School for allowing us to test students, to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript, and to students in the Psychology Honors Seminar at Montclair State University. 308
PY - 2001
Y1 - 2001
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Cerebral asymmetries
KW - Individual differences
KW - Language acquisition
KW - Sentence comprehension
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U2 - 10.1006/brln.2001.2469
DO - 10.1006/brln.2001.2469
M3 - Article
C2 - 11703060
AN - SCOPUS:0034819451
SN - 0093-934X
VL - 78
SP - 308
EP - 331
JO - Brain and Language
JF - Brain and Language
IS - 3
ER -