The Frequency of Referential Patterns Guides Pronoun Comprehension

There is extensive evidence that people are sensitive to the statistical patterns of linguistic elements at the phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels. However, much less is known about how people classify referential events and whether they adapt to the most frequent types of references. Reference is particularly complex because referential tokens can be multiply categorized, raising questions about what can be learned through referential exposure. We test the role of linguistic exposure to referential patterns in five experiments on pronoun comprehension, examining linguistic contexts like "X is doing something with Y" (Experiments 1a, b, and c) and transfer events like "X gave something to Y" (Experiments 2a and b). We ask whether the interpretation of ambiguous he or she pronouns is influenced by recent exposure and find that indeed it is, supporting the hypothesis that adaptation affects discourse processing. In Experiment 1, we further ask whether adaptation persists across three types of referring expressions (he or she pronouns, I/you pronouns, and names) and find that it is limited to he or she pronouns. In Experiment 2, we test whether people can learn both syntactically conditioned and semantically conditioned frequency patterns with transfer verbs. Results showed that they learned both patterns. These results provide critical new evidence that discourse processing biases are informed by exposure to referential patterns.