Knowledge and Learning of Verb Biases in Amnesia (Manuscript accepted to Brain & Language)

Abstract

Verb bias--the co-occurrence frequencies between a verb and the syntactic structures it may appear with--is a critical and reliable linguistic cue for online sentence processing. In particular, listeners use this information to disambiguate sentences with multiple potential syntactic parses (e.g., Feel the frog with the feather.). Further, listeners dynamically update their representations of specific verbs in the face of new evidence about verb-structure co-occurrence. Yet, little is known about the biological memory systems that support the use and dynamic updating of verb bias. We propose that hippocampal-dependent declarative (relational) memory represents a likely candidate system because it has been implicated in the flexible binding of relational co-occurrences and in statistical learning. We explore this question by testing patients with severe and selective deficits in declarative memory (anterograde amnesia), and demographically matched healthy participants, in their on-line interpretation of ambiguous sentences and the ability to update their verb bias with experience. We find that (1) patients and their healthy counterparts use existing verb bias to successfully interpret on-line ambiguity, however (2) unlike healthy young adults, neither group updated these biases in response to recent exposure. These findings demonstrate that using existing representations of verb bias does not necessitate involvement of the declarative memory system, but leave open the question of whether the ability to update representations of verb-specific biases requires hippocampal engagement.