It is well known that people vary considerably in their ability to speak a second language but what is often not appreciated is that there are also substantial variability across individuals in native language skills. These differences are not limited to variations in vocabulary size. Native language users also differ widely across many other aspects of language, including in grammatical and multiple-cue integration skills. In the CSL Lab, we study individual differences in first and second-language learning to uncover whether they might be explained in terms of variation in other cognitive abilities, such as statistical learning. We are currently working on developing reliable measures of individual variability in language and cognition. One promising line of research employs real-time chunking tasks to measure individual differences in both first- and second-language proficiency. Of course, we are also interested in how individual variation manifests themselves across different languages, among which Danish provides an interesting example.
Representative Publications
Frinsel, F.F. & Christiansen, M.H. (2024). Capturing individual differences in sentence processing: How reliable is the self-paced reading task? Behavior Research Methods, 56, 6248-6257.
Kidd, E., Arciuli, J., Christiansen, M.H. & Smithson, M. (2023). The sources and consequences of individual differences in statistical learning for language development. Cognitive Development, 66, 101335.
Bogaerts, L., Siegelman, N., Christiansen, M.H. & Frost, R. (2022). Is there such a thing as a ‘good statistical learner’? Trends in Cognitive Science, 26, 25-37.
Isbilen, E.S., McCauley, S.M. & Christiansen, M.H. (2022). Individual differences in artificial and natural language statistical learning. Cognition, 225, 105123.
Culbertson, G., Andersen, E. & Christiansen, M.H. (2020). Using utterance recall to assess second-language proficiency. Language Learning, 70:S2, 104-132.