A behavioural dataset for studying individual differences in language skills 2019

This resource contains data from 112 Dutch adults (18-29 years of age) who completed the Individual Differences in Language Skills test battery that included 33 behavioural tests assessing language skills and domain-general cognitive skills likely involved in language tasks. The battery included tests measuring linguistic experience (e.g. vocabulary size, prescriptive grammar knowledge), general cognitive skills (e.g. working memory, non-verbal intelligence) and linguistic processing skills (word production/comprehension, sentence production/comprehension). Testing was done in a lab-based setting resulting in high quality data due to tight monitoring of the experimental protocol and to the use of software and hardware that were optimized for behavioural testing. Each participant completed the battery twice (i.e., two test days of four hours each). Raw data from all tests on both days as well as pre-processed data are provided.Investigations of the psychological, social and biological foundations of human speech and language have largely ignored individual differences in the normal range of abilities. For decades, experimental research in this field has almost exclusively involved college students. In addition, most research has aimed to characterise the average performance of this limited pool of participants. Given such a narrow focus on average performance of college students, hardly anything is known about individual differences in language skills within this group, or among adult speakers and listeners more generally. The long-term goal of the Big Question 4 project is to characterise the variability in language skills in large demographically representative samples of young adults and chart the neurobiological and genetic underpinnings of the behavioural variability.