Statistical Learning
Statistical learning at the discourse level
We know that frequency guides lexical and syntactic processing. Do people also keep track of which patterns are most frequent at the discourse level? We have been exploring this idea in several lines of work.
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Corpus work
An examination of naturally-occurring texts shows that some referential patterns are more frequent than others. |
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Individual differences in print exposure
Adults and children who read frequently tend to more consistently use constraints from the linguistic context to interpret pronouns. |
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Short-term exposure studies
An ongoing NSF project (2019-2022) is testing how manipulations of discourse structure during the experiment can shift biases to interpret subsequent ambiguous pronouns. |