Verb biases are shaped through lifelong learning.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Science
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Verbs exhibit syntactic biases, influencing sentence interpretation.
• The origins and adult malleability of these verb biases are not fully understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the malleability of verb biases in adults.
• To determine if newly acquired verb biases impact real-time language processing.

Main Methods:

• Replication of previous findings on language-wide biases using a visual-world paradigm.
• Experiment involving adult participants exposed to unambiguous contexts to train verb biases (instrument vs. modifier).
• Testing of learned biases in ambiguous contexts using eye-movement and action data.

Main Results:

• Language-wide biases were confirmed to guide online syntactic processing.
• Participants showed evidence of newly learned verb biases influencing interpretation of ambiguous sentences.
• Eye-movement and action data indicated that learned biases guided the interpretation of 'with-phrases'.

Conclusions:

• Verb biases are malleable in adulthood.
• Co-occurrence information from language experience continuously shapes verb biases.
• Learned verb biases have lasting consequences for real-time language processing.