Individual Differences in Language Comprehension, 2020-2025

All data and analysis code produced as part of this ESRC funded project has been made fully accessible on the Open Science Foundation website.

1) Learning about the meanings of ambiguous words: Single word-meaning priming experiment (N = 51) where primes are 3-sentence narratives showing that listeners reliably disambiguate spoken ambiguous words on the basis of cues from wider narrative contexts, and retain information about the outcome of these disambiguation processes to inform subsequent encounters of the same word form.

2) Studying Individual Differences in Language Comprehension: A single ambiguity resolution experiment that illustrates the steps that researchers can take to address the challenges associated with devising experimental tasks to measure language comprehension skills.

3) English Vocabulary Test: The Web-based Open-access Reliable Decision on Synonyms (WORDS): Newly developed 30-item Web-based Open-access Reliable Decision on Synonyms (WORDS) English Vocabulary Test (Reliability: Cronbach’s α = 0.82). The test takes on average 4 minutes to complete. It can be freely accessed via Gorilla Open Materials .

4) Diversity of narrative context disrupts the early stage of learning the meanings of novel words: Diversity of narrative context disrupts the early stage of learning the meanings of novel words Single experiment in which adults (N = 100) learned invented meanings for eight pseudowords, either within a single coherent narrative context or five different narrative contexts. Diversity of narrative context did not affect word-form learning, but more semantic features were correctly recalled for words trained in a single context.