Error-Driven Adaptation of Higher-Level Expectations During Reading

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 measure— second-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.