EXPRESS: Individual variability in reliance on semantic heuristics: Cognitive and psycholinguistic factors

Recent psycholinguistic research shows strong evidence that sometimes sentences are comprehended via good-enough processing (for example, based on semantic heuristics) rather than algorithmic syntactic analysis. However, little is known about individual differences in reliance on good-enough processing versus precise algorithmic analysis of the sentence structure. In a psycholinguistic study with 73 young Russian-speaking adults, we investigated whether reliance on semantic heuristics, as measured by the effect of sentence plausibility, was affected by four individual cognitive and psycholinguistic characteristics: phonological working memory span, inhibitory control, reading experience and vocabulary size. We found that reliance on semantic heuristics was characteristic of individuals with a greater reading experience, likely due to stronger semantic expectations from the sentence content. This points to adaptation, or the cognitive system striving for an optimal balance between processing cost and comprehension accuracy, as a possible driver of heuristic-based representations. Inhibitory control and vocabulary size did not significantly modulate the reliance on semantic heuristics. A higher phonological working memory span improved the comprehension of semantically plausible sentences and, in an exploratory analysis of response times, was associated with greater accuracy in slower responses following implausible sentences. This likely indicates post-processing edits of the sentence representation and calls for further research disentangling online versus post-interpretative reliance on semantic heuristics.