Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A recent proposal of syntactic satiation claims that it is driven by adaptation: comprehenders track and update their beliefs about the probability of observing certain sentences, leading to subsequent increases in the acceptability of those sentences. This leaves open what the representational targets of satiation are, that is: what is the tracked information that belief update is based on? In two acceptability judgment experiments, we show that exposure to one type of island violation can lead to the satiation of another island type, suggesting that island type-general representations are tracked by comprehenders in addition to island type-specific representations. The same experimental paradigm can be used for further exploration of the representational targets of satiation.