Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2023 Apr 21:17470218231172908. doi: 10.1177/17470218231172908. Online ahead of print.
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.
PMID:37082989 | DOI:10.1177/17470218231172908
