What do we learn when we adapt to reading regional constructions?

Abstract

We present four experiments investigating adaptation to a regional grammatical structure through reading exposure, using both the needs + past participle construction (e.g., The car needs washed) and the double modal construction (e.g. You might could go there). In each experiment, participants read two stories containing informal dialogue. Half of the participants were exposed to one of the regional constructions and half were not. Those readers exposed to the regional constructions adapted, gradually reading the novel constructions faster over 9 to 15 exemplars. The degree to which the exposed group learned the construction was tested in two ways. In the first two experiments, learning was measured by comparing reading times to acceptable and unacceptable variants of the novel constructions. Readers did not learn either the verb tense rule for the needs construction (Experiment 1) or a simple ordering rule for double modal constructions (Experiment 2). Similarly, in Experiments 3 and 4, metalinguistic judgments used to test learning revealed that participants had failed to acquire the regional grammar of either novel construction. These experiments suggest that the adaptation effects reflect learning some general properties of the experimental stimuli, not learning the syntactic constructions themselves.

Syntactic adaptation leads to updated knowledge for local structural frequencies

“…The idea that syntactic adaptation is actually just an adaptation to unexpected structures in general is not entirely novel: Fraundorf and Jaeger (2016) showed that exposure to the “needs washed” regional construction facilitated other structures deemed ungrammatical in participants’ dialects. Boland et al (2023) showed that participants who exhibited reading time patterns of syntactic adaptation to the “needs washed” construction or double modal construction did not rate either as equally acceptable to Standard American English structures. This suggests that participants were not actually learning to accept the structure as grammatical; rather, they were simply learning to expect the unexpected.…”