Many explanations of the difficulties associated with interpreting object relative clauses appeal to the demands that object relatives make on working memory. MacDonald and Christiansen (2002) pointed to variations in reading experience as a source of differences, arguing that the unique word order of object relatives makes their processing more difficult and more sensitive to the effects of previous experience than the processing of subject relatives. This hypothesis was tested in a largescale study manipulating reading experiences of adults over several weeks. The group receiving relative clause experience increased reading speeds for object relatives more than for subject relatives, whereas a control experience group did not. The reading time data were compared to performance of a computational model given different amounts of experience. The results support claims for experience-based individual differences and an important role for statistical learning in sentence comprehension processes. George Miller's (1956) landmark description of the nature of short term memory was a characterization of both its limits (7 ± 2 units) and the modulation of these limits through learning, in that the units were chunks, the size of which could change through a person's experience with the material being processed. In discussions of computational capacity since that time, different research paradigms have tended to vary in their attention to the claim of capacity limits vs. the claim that capacity changes through learning. For example, within adult sentence comprehension, many accounts have invoked capacity limits to explain people's difficulties in relative clause comprehension (e.g., Gibson, 1998;Just & Carpenter, 1992;Lewis, Vasishth & VanDyke, 2006). All of these accounts have noted that experience could affect processing abilities, but the focus in these accounts has been on showing how a characterization of capacity limits explains certain aspects of sentence comprehension
The relationship between print exposure and measures of reading skill was examined in college students (N=99, 58 female; mean age=20.3 years). Print exposure was measured with several new self-reports of reading and writing habits, as well as updated versions of the Author Recognition Test and the Magazine Recognition Test (Stanovich & West, 1989). Participants completed a sentence comprehension task with syntactically complex sentences, and reading times and comprehension accuracy were measured. An additional measure of reading skill was provided by participants’ scores on the verbal portions of the ACT, a standardized achievement test. Higher levels of print exposure were associated with higher sentence processing abilities and superior verbal ACT performance. The relative merits of different print exposure assessments are discussed
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