{"doi":"10.31234/osf.io/9qvyf","title":"Stability and Instability in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution and Updating Abilities: An Individual Differences Approach","abstract":"Comprehenders make predictions about the meaning and structure of linguistic information as the utterance unfolds. However, when the actual content does not match the expectation, costly reanalysis processes are required. Previous work has suggested that experience with unexpected syntactic structures reduces such repair costs, a phenomenon referred to as syntactic adaptation or updating. However, other studies have failed to replicate these effects. We investigated (a) whether there was syntactic updating at the group level and whether it persisted over time; and (b) whether there were stable individual differences in syntactic ambiguity resolution and cognitive abilities that could potentially lead to individual variation in syntactic updating. Participants were exposed to different distributions of expected and unexpected completions of temporarily ambiguous sentences and tested on whether that experience changed their processing of unexpected sentence structures. They completed two sessions, one week apart enabling us to examine the stability of individual differences. Participants also completed assessments of cognitive abilities and extent of language experience. At the group level, we did not observe any significant syntactic updating. At the individual level, we found that syntactic ambiguity resolution was stable within a session but not across sessions. Individual differences in cognitive abilities and language experience did not correlate with syntactic ambiguity resolution or updating. These results suggest as-yet-unexplained fluctuation in individuals’ syntactic processing that could contribute to lack of replication of syntactic effects. Our dataset may be useful for exploring individual-level and state-level variability in a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic tasks.","journal":"PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)","year":2023,"id":411330,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9456,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1113596,"name":"Malathi Thothathiri","orcid":"0000-0002-6449-405X","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1191791,"name":"Kelly Marshall","orcid":"0000-0002-3907-8345","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":36,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:21:42.971455Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}