Troyer Melissa, Borovsky Arielle
Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego.
Department of Psychology, Florida State University.
Cogn Sci. 2017 May;41 Suppl 6(Suppl 6):1405-1433. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12488. Epub 2017 Mar 13.
In infancy, maternal socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with real-time language processing skills, but whether or not (and if so, how) this relationship carries into adulthood is unknown. We explored the effects of maternal SES in college-aged adults on eye-tracked, spoken sentence comprehension tasks using the visual world paradigm. When sentences ended in highly plausible, expected target nouns (Exp. 1), higher SES was associated with a greater likelihood of considering alternative endings related to the action of the sentence. Moreover, for unexpected sentence endings (Exp. 2), individuals from higher SES backgrounds were sensitive to whether the ending was action-related (plausible) or unrelated (implausible), showing a benefit for plausible endings. Individuals from lower SES backgrounds did not show this advantage. This suggests maternal SES can influence the dynamics of sentence processing even in adulthood, with consequences for processing unexpected content. These findings highlight the importance of early lexical experience for adult language skills.
在婴儿期，母亲的社会经济地位（SES）与实时语言处理技能相关，但这种关系是否会延续到成年期（如果会，又是如何延续的）尚不清楚。我们使用视觉世界范式，探讨了母亲SES对大学生成年人眼动跟踪的口语句子理解任务的影响。当句子以高度合理、预期的目标名词结尾时（实验1），较高的SES与考虑与句子动作相关的替代结尾的可能性更大有关。此外，对于意外的句子结尾（实验2），来自较高SES背景的个体对结尾是否与动作相关（合理）或不相关（不合理）很敏感，表现出对合理结尾的偏好。来自较低SES背景的个体没有表现出这种优势。这表明母亲的SES即使在成年期也能影响句子处理的动态过程，对处理意外内容产生影响。这些发现凸显了早期词汇经验对成人语言技能的重要性。
