Error-Driven Adaptation of Higher-Level Expectations During Reading.

Abstract

Fine et al. (2013) recently demonstrated that readers continually adapt their syntactic expectations in order to accurately approximate the distributions of syntactic structures in a given communicative context.Here, we examine patterns of eye movements as subjects read sentences that contain an atypical distribution of syntactic structures to gain more fine-grained insight into the time-course and nature of this adaptive process.An adaptation effect was only elicited on a late measuresecond-pass reading times-consistent with the claim that expectation adaptation to an atypical distribution of syntactic structures occurs at a higher level that is abstracted away from the physical properties of the visual input.