Learning the statistics of pronoun reference: By word or by category?

Evidence shows that readers tend to follow recently-encountered patterns for interpreting ambiguous pronouns. If recent exposure includes frequent pronouns with prepositional object antecedents (e.g., “Matt went to the library with Ana. She took out a book”), people adapt and are more likely to assign ambiguous pronouns to prepositional antecedents than if they were exposed to pronouns with subject antecedents (Johnson & Arnold, 2022). However, it is unclear how people categorize different referential structures and how broadly they make generalizations. Johnson and Arnold (2022) found that people can learn a referential relationship specific to third-person pronouns and an antecedent's syntactic or thematic properties. The current study uses this paradigm to test how broadly people generalize categories of different types of pronouns and antecedents. Do people adapt to the behavior of categorizing “he” and “she” as individual words, or as a general class? (Experiment 1). Do people learn about likely antecedents for pronouns separately for different verb constructions (transfer vs. joint-action) and thematic roles, or broadly by grammatical function? (Experiments 2 & 3). Participants were repeatedly exposed to a referential structure of a particular type of pronouns or antecedents, and then were tested on ambiguous pronouns. All experiments showed that pronoun adaptation generalizes to new instances from the broad categorization of pronouns and antecedents. •Provide robust evidence that referential adaptation guides pronoun comprehension.•Adaptation to he/she generalizes to each other with no advantage to comprehension of matching word.•Referential adaptation generalizes across different antecedent categories.