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Readers generalize adaptation to newly-encountered dialectal structures to other unfamiliar structures
Scott H Fraundorf1, T Florian Jaeger2
1University of Pittsburgh.
Journal of Memory and Language
|April 6, 2017
Summary
Readers can adapt to unfamiliar grammatical structures, like "needs washed," by exposure. This adaptation improves processing and generalizes to related structures, suggesting implicit learning plays a key role.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Syntactic processing relies on statistical learning of encountered input.
- Reader adaptation to syntactic structure frequency is known, but learning unfamiliar structures is less understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- Investigate reader adaptation to an unfamiliar syntactic structure: the 'needs'+past participle.
- Explore generalization of adaptation to related structures.
Main Methods:
- Two self-paced reading experiments.
- Web-based recruitment targeting regional familiarity with the 'needs'+past participle structure.
- Comparison of reading times between familiar and unfamiliar groups.
Main Results:
- Participants unfamiliar with the 'needs'+past participle initially read it slower.
- Over time, unfamiliar readers adapted, reading the structure more fluently.
- Adapted readers generalized their learning to related syntactic structures.
Conclusions:
- Readers adapt to and learn unfamiliar syntactic structures through exposure.
- Adaptation leads to processing similar to native users.
- Learned adaptations can generalize to other structures, supporting implicit learning theories.