Rapid Expectation Adaptation during Syntactic Comprehension

By Alex B. Fine, T. Florian Jaeger, Thomas A. Farmer, Ting Qian, K. Paterson. PLoS ONE, 2013

392 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When we read or listen to language, we are faced with the challenge of inferring intended messages from noisy input. This challenge is exacerbated by considerable variability between and within speakers. Focusing on syntactic processing (parsing), we test the hypothesis that language comprehenders rapidly adapt to the syntactic statistics of novel linguistic environments (e.g., speakers or genres). Two self-paced reading experiments investigate changes in readers’ syntactic expectations based on repeated exposure to sentences with temporary syntactic ambiguities (so-called “garden path sentences”). These sentences typically lead to a clear expectation violation signature when the temporary ambiguity is resolved to an a priori less expected structure (e.g., based on the statistics of the lexical context). We find that comprehenders rapidly adapt their syntactic expectations to converge towards the local statistics of novel environments. Specifically, repeated exposure to a priori unexpected structures can reduce, and even completely undo, their processing disadvantage (Experiment 1). The opposite is also observed: a priori expected structures become less expected (even eliciting garden paths) in environments where they are hardly ever observed (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that, when changes in syntactic statistics are to be expected (e.g., when entering a novel environment), comprehenders can rapidly adapt their expectations, thereby overcoming the processing disadvantage that mistaken expectations would otherwise cause. Our findings take a step towards unifying insights from research in expectation-based models of language processing, syntactic priming, and statistical learning.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d89d9ee6c027ec270de966eb35a6b8a736cd1cde

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Citations in the corpus

Learning (not) to predict: Grammatical gender processing in second language acquisition (2016, methodology): “Overall, using gender assignment for gender agreement prediction would incur prediction errors for the items with non-target subjective gender assignment, such that the parser adapts its predictive capacities according to experience (see also Fine et al., 2013).”
Consequences of the Now-or-Never bottleneck for signed versus spoken languages (2015, background): “…(Stivers et al. 2009) and which seems to require that listeners make quite specific predictions about when the speaker’s current turn will finish (Magyari & De Ruiter 2012), as well as being able to quickly adapt their expectations to specific linguistic environments (Fine et al. 2013).”
The logic of syntactic priming and acceptability judgments (2016, positive): “13 Many studies demonstrate facilitation following repeated presentation of a construction, for example reduced processing times for strong garden path sentences (Fine et al. 2013) or marginally unacceptable sentences (Kaschak and Glenberg 2004), and a higher likelihood of judging marginally unaccep”
What do we mean by prediction in language comprehension? (2015, background): “…speakerspecific adaptation, see Kleinschmidt & Jaeger, 2015; for discussion of other aspects of syntactic, semantic variability, and adaptation, see Fine et al., 2013, and for discussion of neural adaptation, in relation to the P600 and other late positivities in language comprehension, see…”