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Individual differences in language skills

Individuals differ greatly in their ability to use language. While language users readily accept this fact, psycholinguistics has only recently begun to systematically examine this variability.

To contribute to this growing field of research and to move beyond some of its limitations, a research team at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, spear-headed by Antje Meyer, James McQueen and Florian Hintz, developed an extensive battery of behavioral tests measuring  (1) linguistic experience, (2) general cognitive skills implicated in language processing, and (3) linguistic processing skills for younger adult speakers of Dutch. The Individual Differences in Language Skills (IDLaS-NL) test battery has been validated in a large number of individuals and is available to the research community (Hintz et al., in press, BRM).

To facilitate work on individual differences in other languages, Sandra Bethke, Antje Meyer and Florian Hintz  are currently developing a German version of the test battery (IDLaS-DE). As its Dutch sibling, the German battery features tests falling into the broader categories (1)-(3). In five pilot studies run with samples of around 80 participants each, the overall structure of the German test battery has been finalized and will be validated as a whole with a sample of approx. 160 participants. Following successful validation, the new tool will be used to investigate individual differences in conversation by relating conversation-specific characteristics, such as utterance length or type-token-ratio, to variability as measured in the test battery. Doing so, enables the researchers to explore and identify skills that affect the way we produce and comprehend language in conversation.