Kyla McConnell

Publications

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  • McConnell, K., Hintz, F., & Meyer, A. S. (2025). Individual differences in online research: Comparing lab-based and online administration of a psycholinguistic battery of linguistic and domain-general skills. Behavior Research Methods, 57: 22. doi:10.3758/s13428-024-02533-x.

    Abstract

    Experimental psychologists and psycholinguists increasingly turn to online research for data collection due to the ease of sampling many diverse participants in parallel. Online research has shown promising validity and consistency, but is it suitable for all paradigms? Specifically, is it reliable enough for individual differences research? The current paper reports performance on 15 tasks from a psycholinguistic individual differences battery, including timed and untimed assessments of linguistic abilities, as well as domain-general skills. From a demographically homogenous sample of young Dutch people, 149 participants participated in the lab study, and 515 participated online. Our results indicate that there is no reason to assume that participants tested online will underperform compared to lab-based testing, though they highlight the importance of motivation and the potential for external help (e.g., through looking up answers) online. Overall, we conclude that there is reason for optimism in the future of online research into individual differences.
  • McConnell, K., & Blumenthal-Dramé, A. (2021). Usage-Based Individual Differences in the Probabilistic Processing of Multi-Word Sequences. Frontiers in Communication, 6: 703351. doi:10.3389/fcomm.2021.703351.

    Abstract

    While it is widely acknowledged that both predictive expectations and retrodictive
    integration influence language processing, the individual differences that affect these
    two processes and the best metrics for observing them have yet to be fully described.
    The present study aims to contribute to the debate by investigating the extent to which
    experienced-based variables modulate the processing of word pairs (bigrams).
    Specifically, we investigate how age and reading experience correlate with lexical
    anticipation and integration, and how this effect can be captured by the metrics of
    forward and backward transition probability (TP). Participants read more and less
    strongly associated bigrams, paired to control for known lexical covariates such as
    bigram frequency and meaning (i.e., absolute control, total control, absolute silence,
    total silence) in a self-paced reading (SPR) task. They additionally completed
    assessments of exposure to print text (Author Recognition Test, Shipley vocabulary
    assessment, Words that Go Together task) and provided their age. Results show that
    both older age and lesser reading experience individually correlate with stronger TP
    effects. Moreover, TP effects differ across the spillover region (the two words following
    the noun in the bigram)

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