Diachronic change in verb usage statistics predicts differences in sentence processing across the lifespan (2024)

Abstract: Diachronic corpus analyses reveal that syntactic usage patterns change over time. Are these changes reflected in differences in language processing across the human lifespan? We use the attachment of with-prepositional phrases (PPs) as a case study for investigating this question: a with-PP can attach to a verb, describing an instrument with which to perform the action (e.g., Slice the cake [with a knife]), or to a direct object (DO), modifying the noun (e.g., Slice the cake [with the pink frosting]). The relative frequencies of the instrument and modifier constructions differ depending on the verb in the sentence — the ‘verb bias’. Using two diachronic corpora, Syntgram and CCOHA, we analyzed the co-occurrence statistics of 27 verbs and instrument vs. modifier with-PPs. Between the 1940s and the 2000s, some verbs were more instrument-biased (i.e., more likely to co-occur with with-PPs that attach to the verb than the DO) than others and co-occurrence patterns were more similar for temporally close decades, suggesting subtle diachronic changes in usage patterns. We collected sentence interpretation data probing with-PP attachment preferences in participants ranging in age from 25 to 75. Interpretations of globally ambiguous sentences (e.g., Pet the rabbit with the towel) differed depending on the verb (i.e., some verbs elicit more instrument than modifier interpretations of the PP than others and vice versa) and on the age of the participant. In particular, verbs which became less instrument-biased over time elicited more instrument interpretations among older adults than young adults, suggesting that variation in language comprehension can be in part predicted from the corpus statistics of the time periods that an individual experienced.

## introduction language is constantly changing and evolving over time @xcite . each generation inherits the form-meaning mappings that previous generations have developed. new words and usages may arise due to colexification or word-sense extension as new generations need to fill a communicative gap @xcite . similarly, some syntactic forms can proliferate while others disappear (i.e., @xcite . given that the language changes, the usage patterns that are experienced by an individual over their lifetime differ across generations. here, we investigate whether syntactic change over time, at the level of the language, is reflected in different patterns of online language processing across generations within the same time period. ## quantifying diachronic changes in verb biases our first aim was to quantify how much the verbspecific usage of the instrument and modifier constructions changes over time. we specifically focused on the 27 verbs (see ## verb biases across the lifespan next, we conducted a web-based replication of experiment 1 from @xcite , but intentionally collected data from participants across the lifespan (ages 25-75). ## predicting differences in interpretations from diachronic change the results from section 2 indicate that, based on corpus frequencies, verb biases change over time (fig. 1 ). the results from section 3 indicate that, verb biases appear to change across the lifespan (fig. 6 ). in this section, we aimed to test whether age-related differences in interpretation are related to diachronic changes in verb biases. ## discussion through two corpus analyses (section 2), we found that verb biases (whether a verb co-occurs more frequently with instrument or modifier constructions) often change over time. while many verbs have largely stable biases, the most frequent type of diachronic change between 1940 and 2000 is a decrease in instrument bias. our behavioral experiment (section 3) replicated prior findings that the interpretations of sentences with globally ambiguous with-pp attachment were predicted by a verb's bias. these verb bias effects appeared stronger for younger adults than older adults. this may be in part due to the fact that verbs' biases were categorized using norms from a previous study, which were collected from a sample of young adults. finally, we used two bayesian models to test the relationship between the corpus-based verb bias trends over time and the lifespan data (section 4). while there were some discrepancies in the verbspecific trends between the two corpora, the model results were consistent. when the instrument bias of a verb decreased between 1940 and 2000, the verb was more likely to elicit instrument interpretations among older adults than young adults. this suggests that the experience with verb biases of past decades (greater instrument bias for some verbs in the past), unique to the older adults, impacted their in-the-moment sentence processing. our results extend previous findings that language users update their syntactic representations based on experience with the statistics of the environment @xcite and indicate that, at least for the alternation studied here, this updating unfolds over many decades (perhaps due to infrequent encounters of some verbs in the key constructions). ## conclusion language is continually changing over time, due to a variety of factors. previous studies have highlighted the relationship between online sentence processing and recent linguistic experience. our findings additionally suggest that previous linguistic experience continues to influence online sentence processing on the timescale of decades.