Failure to replicate talker-specific syntactic adaptation

Sentence understanding is affected by recent experience. An important open question is whether this reflects adaptation to the statistics of the input. Support for this hypothesis comes from the recent finding that listeners can simultaneously learn and maintain the syntactic statistics of multiple talkers (Kamide, 2012). We attempt—and fail—to replicate this finding. This calls into questions whether recency effects in sentence processing originate in the same adaptive mechanisms operating during speech perception (for which talker-specific adaptation is well-established).