Implicit Context-Specific Learning Leads to Rapid Shifts in Syntactic Expectations

During incremental language understanding, comprehenders draw on a rich base of probabilistic cues to efficiently process the noisy perceptual input they receive. One challenge listeners face in employing such cues is that most cues are contextdependent. Here, we present an experiment that investigates the extent to which listeners learn situation-specific adjustments in the information and/or weight of the lexical bias of a verb. Specifically, we ask to what extent comprehenders are able to rapidly change their interpretation of lexical cues to syntactic structure, where such behavior would be rational due to situation-specific statistics in the environment.