title: Familial handedness and access to words, meaning, and syntax during sentence comprehension.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Montclair State University, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043, USA. townsendd@mail.montclair.edu
authors.forename: D J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Townsend
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Carrithers
authors.forename: T G
authors.initials: TG
authors.lastname: Bever
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D004007:Dichotic Listening Tests; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000235:genetics*; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014825:Vocabulary; D014936:Word Association Tests