Referential Adaptation in the Face of Changing Input Frequencies: The System Wants to Return to Baseline

Evidence shows that adults adapt to patterns found in their language environment both at the syntactic level and referential level. However, little is known about how adaptation shifts in response to changes in the input, and existing theories make conflicting predictions. In two experiments, we examine referential adaptation with a between-subjects blocked priming paradigm to test whether participants adapt flexibly if multiple referential patterns are present in the language input. The study exposed subjects to two blocks of exposure stimuli, each featuring a distinct referential pattern. Ambiguous critical sentences were interleaved throughout, in order to measure the effect of exposure to each reference remention pattern. Experiment 1 used a written paradigm, and Experiment 2 used an audio paradigm. Across experiments, we found that subjects were able to adapt flexibly to both referential patterns. However, this effect was limited: participants adapted to the second exposure condition only when they encountered a low-frequency referential pattern first. These results suggest that participants are especially sensitive to the exposure they receive at the start of a new situation, and subsequent adjustments depend on whether the new pattern is consistent with lifetime processing biases. Our findings have implications for theories of implicit learning and adaptation.