Chernova Daria, Novozhilov Artem, Slioussar Natalia
Institute for Cognitive Studies, Saint Petersburg University, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
School of Linguistics, HSE University, Moscow, Russia.
Front Psychol. 2023 Feb 10;14:1035961. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1035961. eCollection 2023.
Although all healthy adults have advanced syntactic processing abilities in their native language, psycholinguistic studies report extensive variation among them. However, very few tests were developed to assess this variation, presumably, because when adult native speakers on syntactic processing, by other tasks, they usually reach ceiling performance. We developed a Sentence Comprehension Test for the Russian language aimed to fill this gap. The test captures variation among participants and does not show ceiling effects. The Sentence Comprehension Test includes 60 unambiguous grammatically complex sentences and 40 control sentences that are of the same length, but are syntactically simpler. Every sentence is accompanied by a comprehension question targeting potential syntactic processing problems and interpretation errors associated with them. Grammatically complex sentences were selected on the basis of the previous literature and then tested in a pilot study. As a result, six constructions that trigger the largest number of errors were identified. For these constructions, we also analyzed which ones are associated with the longest word-by-word reading times, question answering times and the highest error rates. These differences point to different sources of syntactic processing difficulties and can be relied upon in subsequent studies. We conducted two experiments to validate the final version of the test. Getting similar results in two independent experiments, as well as in two presentation modes (reading and listening modes are compared in Experiment 2) confirms its reliability. In Experiment 1, we also showed that the results of the test correlate with the scores in the verbal working memory span test.
虽然所有健康的成年人在其母语中都具备高级句法处理能力，但心理语言学研究表明，他们之间存在广泛差异。然而，据推测，由于成年母语者在进行句法处理时，通过其他任务通常会达到上限表现，因此很少有测试被开发出来评估这种差异。我们开发了一种俄语句子理解测试，旨在填补这一空白。该测试能够捕捉参与者之间的差异，并且不会出现上限效应。句子理解测试包括60个明确无误的语法复杂句子和40个控制句子，这些控制句子长度相同，但句法更简单。每个句子都伴有一个理解问题，针对潜在的句法处理问题以及与之相关的解释错误。语法复杂句子是根据先前的文献选择的，然后在一项初步研究中进行测试。结果，确定了六种引发错误最多的结构。对于这些结构，我们还分析了哪些结构与逐词阅读时间最长、回答问题时间最长以及错误率最高相关。这些差异指出了句法处理困难的不同来源，可在后续研究中加以利用。我们进行了两项实验来验证测试的最终版本。在两个独立实验中以及在两种呈现模式下（实验2中比较了阅读和听力模式）获得相似结果，证实了其可靠性。在实验1中，我们还表明测试结果与言语工作记忆广度测试的分数相关。
