[UMR] Israel de la Fuente (Lille 3)

I present findings from a series of studies that investigated offline and online ambiguous pronoun interpretation in English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. We observe that participants' interpretation preferences seem to be affected by exposure (in terms of availability and frequency) to alternative structures, such as different pronominal forms (null vs. overt; stressed vs. unstressed) and different types of subordinate constructions (finite vs. non-finite), in the language and, crucially, in the context of an experiment. Our findings are in line with probabilistic accounts of comprehension which emphasize the role of statistical learning, proposing that people learn and constantly update the frequencies and distributions of particular linguistic forms occurring in their environment.