Roy Simantika, Johnson Elyce D, Arnold Jennifer E
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina, Campus Box 3270, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2025 May 28. doi: 10.3758/s13423-025-02676-8.
People use context to resolve ambiguous pronouns, for example, one contextual bias is to assign pronouns to the subject of the previous sentence, for example, Ana in "Ana ate with Liz. She…." Recent evidence suggests that these biases shift in the direction of the most frequent patterns in the local context. Yet referential adaptation is different from adaptation to words and structures, raising questions about the mechanism of adaptation. Here we test whether all recent exposures equally influence processing biases. Alternatively, learning may only occur when people encounter unexpected patterns, as predicted by error-based learning accounts that have been proposed for syntactic adaptation. We thus further test whether this "inverse frequency effect" also occurs during referential adaptation. In English the subject-reference pattern is more common than the nonsubject-reference pattern, so if people only adapt to rare patterns they should only adjust their processing biases when exposed to the less-common nonsubject-reference pattern. We tested this by comparing subject- and nonsubject-exposure with a neutral exposure condition. In two experiments we found that only the nonsubject-exposure condition differed from the neutral exposure condition, supporting the conclusion that referential adaptation exhibits an inverse frequency effect.
人们利用语境来解析歧义代词，例如，一种语境偏差是将代词指代前一句的主语，比如在“Ana和Liz一起吃饭。她……”中，将“她”指代Ana。最近的证据表明，这些偏差会朝着局部语境中最常见的模式方向转变。然而，指代适应与对单词和结构的适应不同，这引发了关于适应机制的问题。在这里，我们测试最近的所有接触是否同样影响加工偏差。或者，正如为句法适应所提出的基于错误学习的理论所预测的那样，学习可能只在人们遇到意外模式时才会发生。因此，我们进一步测试这种“逆频率效应”在指代适应过程中是否也会出现。在英语中，主语指代模式比非主语指代模式更常见，所以如果人们只适应罕见模式，那么他们应该只在接触到不太常见的非主语指代模式时才调整其加工偏差。我们通过将主语接触和非主语接触与中性接触条件进行比较来测试这一点。在两个实验中，我们发现只有非主语接触条件与中性接触条件不同，这支持了指代适应表现出逆频率效应的结论。
