YanFarmerJaeger_EyeTrackingAdaptation

Autor: SHAORONG YAN, Thomas A. Farmer, T. Florian Jaeger
Rok vydání: 2019
Předmět:
Popis: Implicit expectations play a crucial role during language processing. These expectations are often assumed to be static once acquired, or to change only at relatively slow time scales.Some theoretical proposals, however, hold that comprehenders continuously adapt their expectations based on recent input, and that this adaptation underlies phenomena such as syntactic priming. Existing evidence from research on sentence processing has confounded adaptation to the experimental task with evidence for expectation adaptation. Here we eliminate this confound by, for the first time, investigating expectation adaptation during natural reading. In two eye-tracking experiments, subjects read sentences that contain a higher than expected proportion of a previously unexpected structure (reduced relative clauses). We inspect whether and how syntactic adaptation manifests in the eye-movement measures: if subjects adapt their syntactic expectations, their reading times for unexpected syntactic structures should decrease over the course of the experiment. This prediction is confirmed in both experiments, providing evidence for expectation adaptation during naturalreading. Specifically, we find evidence for syntactic adaptation primarily for regression-related measures but not first pass reading measures. We discuss the different possible accounts of this pattern of syntactic adaptation in the eye-movement record.
Databáze: OpenAIRE