Syntactic adaptation leads to updated knowledge for local structural frequencies

Abstract

Syntactic adaptation has been shown to occur for various temporarily ambiguous structures wherein an initially unexpected resolution becomes easier to process after repeated exposure. More controversial and less replicated is the claim that this adaptation toward a locally frequent structure occurs due to a strategic shifting of expectations to match short-term statistical regularities such that readers adapt away from the a priori more frequent structure. Experiment 1 replicates the initial adaptation toward a coordination garden path structure and away from a compound NP structure using self-paced reading; however, this paradigm has been criticized for its low reliability for detecting such small effects. To this end, Experiments 2 and 3 use a combination of self-paced reading and sentence completion tasks to replicate initial adaptation toward both coordination and reduced relative garden path structures and show evidence for a preference for these structures over their a priori more frequent alternatives. Together, these data reveal that participants may be tracking local structural statistics in real-time; however, they may not be able to rapidly use that information to update processing behaviors.

Adaptation of Gap Predictions in Filler-Gap Dependency Processing during Reading

“…Additional recent work has replicated the original finding with reduced relative clauses (Dempsey et al 2020(Dempsey et al , 2023Yan and Jaeger 2020) as well as expanded the range of structures involved in successful adaptation to include relative clause attachment ambiguities (Chun 2018;Kamide 2012), subject versus object relative clauses (Wells et al 2009), and coordination (Kaan et al 2019) and dialectal differences (Boland et al 2023;Fraundorf and Jaeger 2016;Kaschak and Glenberg 2004).…”

Investigating Adaptation to And-Coordination in English: An ERP Study

“…is referred to as the "garden-path effect". Several self-paced reading studies have reported a reduction in the garden-path effect as more sentences of the target structure are read (e.g., Atkinson 2016;Dempsey et al 2023;Fine et al 2010Fine et al , 2013Kaan et al 2019). It is tempting to interpret an increasingly smaller garden-path effect as evidence that readers start expecting the initially less-preferred structure.…”

“…This preference reversal effect is convincing evidence that adaptation has taken place. However, many studies fail to find such reversal effects (c.f., e.g., Atkinson 2016;Dempsey et al 2020Dempsey et al , 2023Harrington Stack et al 2018). Power analyses (Prasad and Linzen 2021) suggest that the lack of consistency among studies may be due to a lack of power, and that more than 1200 participants are needed to detect adaptation in most between-group studies using self-paced reading.…”