Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children and adults are guided by verb-specific syntactic like-lihoods, or verb bias, in language comprehension and produc-tion. Recent reports showed that verb bias can be altered bynew linguistic experience. We investigated the mechanismsunderlying this verb bias learning or adaptation. Specifically,we asked whether verb bias learning, like abstract syntacticpriming, is driven by error-based implicit learning. We reportthree experiments in which we altered the biases of familiardative verbs in children’s and adults’ sentence production, viatraining trials that induced participants to produce each verbconsistently in either double-object or prepositional-object da-tive structures. Participants’ syntactic choices in later test trialsreflected the expected adaptation of verb bias to the trainingexperience. In addition, the magnitude of the training effectvaried with the likelihood of each sentence structure and withpre-existing verb bias: Unexpected verb-structure combina-tions resulted in larger training effects, suggesting the opera-tion of error-based implicit learning.