Department of Educational Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2024 Feb;77(2):363-382. doi: 10.1177/17470218231172908. Epub 2023 Jun 2.
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 towards 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 towards a coordination garden path structure using self-paced reading; however, this paradigm has been criticised 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 towards 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 behaviours.
已证实，各种暂时模棱两可的结构会发生句法适应，在重复接触后，最初意想不到的解析变得更容易处理。更有争议且复制较少的说法是，这种适应局部频繁结构的现象是由于策略性地调整期望以匹配短期统计规律所致，即读者适应了先验更频繁的结构。实验 1 使用自定步速阅读复制了最初向协调花园路径结构的适应；然而，这种范式因其检测这种小效应的可靠性低而受到批评。为此，实验 2 和实验 3 结合使用自定步速阅读和句子完成任务来复制最初向协调和简化相对花园路径结构的适应，并证明了这些结构比其先验更频繁的替代结构更受欢迎。总的来说，这些数据表明，参与者可能会实时跟踪局部结构统计信息；然而，他们可能无法快速利用这些信息来更新处理行为。
