{"pk":28684,"title":"Subtle differences in language experience moderate performance onlanguage-based cognitive tests","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Cognitive tests used to measure individual differences are gen-erally designed with equality in mind: the same “broadly ac-ceptable” items are used for all participants. This has unknownconsequences for equity, particularly when a single set of lin-guistic stimuli are used for a diverse population of languageusers. We hypothesized that differences in language varietywould result in disparities in psycholinguistically meaningfulproperties of test items in two widely-used cognitive tasks, re-sulting in large differences in performance. As a proxy for in-dividuals’ language use, we administered a self-report surveyof media consumption. We identified two substantial clustersfrom the survey data, roughly orthogonal to a priori groups re-cruited into the study (university students and members of thesurrounding community). We found effects of both populationand cluster membership. Comparing item-wise differences be-tween the clusters’ language models did not identify specificitems driving performance differences.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8vn5s77f","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Maury","middle_name":"","last_name":"Courtland","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Southern California","department":""},{"first_name":"Aida","middle_name":"","last_name":"Davani","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Southern California","department":""},{"first_name":"Melissa","middle_name":"","last_name":"Reyes","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Southern California","department":""},{"first_name":"Leigh","middle_name":"","last_name":"Yeh","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Southern California","department":""},{"first_name":"Jun","middle_name":"","last_name":"Leung","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Southern California","department":""},{"first_name":"Brendan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kennedy","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Southern California","department":""},{"first_name":"Morteza","middle_name":"","last_name":"Dehghani","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Southern California","department":""},{"first_name":"Jason","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zevin","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Southern California","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28684/galley/18555/download/"}]}