Adaptation to reference patterns in language

Humans are remarkable in their ability to flexibly learn from experience, and studies have shown that this applies to language too. The uniquely human ability to understand language is shaped by the words and structures that are most frequently encountered, in a process known as adaptation. However, most work on adaptation has focused on “small units” like speech sounds, words, and sentences.

Much less is known about how people use common patterns in conversation and discourse to develop robust mechanisms for understanding language in context. This project tests the ability to track patterns in reference – that is, who or what is referred to – including how human learners extract reference patterns and how doing so changes interpretation of a speaker’s meaning.

Understanding this kind of adaptation in language could explain how people adjust to differences in communication styles and why language use changes across generations. This project provides scientific training for the next generation of STEM scholars by supporting the development of skills in experiment implementation, statistical analysis, and written and spoken science communication.

This project focuses on words that depend on context to clarify the speaker’s intended meaning. For example, in “the professor told the student to edit their paper,” “their paper” could refer to the student’s paper, the professor’s paper, or a joint paper by the professor and student. The context is useful, in part, because people learn which types of references are most frequent.

However, it is not yet known how many different frequency patterns people can track. Using an experimental approach, this project tests how adaptation to specific linguistic patterns influences reference interpretation. Specifically, this study examines whether people track multiple reference patterns simultaneously and how such adaptation is used to develop effective processing strategies.

By testing the generalization of adaptation, this project discovers whether different types of referring contexts are considered the same for the purpose of adaptation. Moreover, this work examines adaptation as a mechanism for explaining why language changes over time and how speech patterns lead to shifts in how language is interpreted.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.