Research in sentence processing has increasingly examined the role of individual differences in language comprehension. In work on native and nonnative sentence processing, examining individual differences can contribute crucial insight into theoretical debates about the extent to which nativelike processing is possible in a nonnative language. Despite this increased interest in individual differences, whether commonly used psycholinguistic tasks can reliably measure individual differences between participants has not been systematically examined. As a preliminary examination of this issue in nonnative processing, we report a self-paced reading experiment on garden-path sentences in native and nonnative comprehension. At the group level we replicated previously observed findings in native and nonnative speakers. However, while we found that our self-paced reading experiment was a reliable way of assessing individual differences in overall reading speed and comprehension accuracy, it did not consistently measure individual differences in the size of garden-path effects in our sample (N = 64 native and 64 nonnative participants, and 24 experimental items). These results suggest that before individual differences in sentence processing can be meaningfully assessed, the question of whether commonly used tasks can consistently measure individual differences requires systematic examination.

中文翻译：

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量化母语和非母语句子处理中的个体差异

句子处理的研究越来越多地研究个体差异在语言理解中的作用。在关于母语和非母语句子处理的工作中，检查个体差异可以为关于非母语语言中类似母语处理的程度的理论辩论提供重要的见解。尽管人们对个体差异越来越感兴趣，但常用的心理语言学任务是否可以可靠地测量参与者之间的个体差异尚未得到系统检查。作为对非母语处理中这个问题的初步检验，我们报告了一个关于花园小径句子在母语和非母语理解中的自定进度阅读实验。在小组层面，我们复制了之前在母语和非母语者身上观察到的发现。然而，ñ= 64 名本地参与者和 64 名非本地参与者，以及 24 个实验项目）。这些结果表明，在可以有意义地评估句子处理中的个体差异之前，常用任务是否可以一致地测量个体差异的问题需要系统检查。