Investigating the role of distribution in syntactic comprehension

Comprehenders encounter a variety of syntactic structures through reading or spoken conversation. In some cases, sentences can be ambiguous and have more than one meaning. In "The spy saw the cop with the binoculars", one interpretation is that the spy is looking through the binoculars, while an alternative is that the cop has the binoculars. Despite this ambiguity, comprehenders are able to converge on a single interpretation. The mechanisms behind this are still debated today as many factors have been shown to guide comprehension. Experience is thought to play a large role in comprehension, yet despite its large role in theoretical models, there is still no direct evidence of whether people actually keep track of distribution i.e., the relative frequency of a target structure and its competing structures. In three self-paced reading experiments, the current study investigates whether people can implicitly acquire syntactic distributional information given the verb "needs", and whether that information can be generalized to another verb. In all experiments, the relative frequency of an unfamiliar, dialectal structure ("The meal needs cooked") was manipulated while holding raw frequency constant, resulting in the creation of different syntactic distributions. Results showed differences in syntactic processing in a distribution with a high proportion of the dialectal structure compared to one with a low proportion of the dialectal structure (Exp. 1). However, there were no differences in processing when the dialectal structure was the majority (Exp. 2). Furthermore, relative frequency information did not transfer to a new verb that used the same syntactic structure (Exp. 3). This study is the first to show causal evidence of comprehenders acquiring relative frequency information, consistent with current models of syntactic processing. Further research will need to address open questions about the level of statistical detail acquired, and what kind of information is generalized.Doctor of Philosoph