It is well established that people adapt to statistical regularities at phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels. Much less is known about adaptation to discourse-level structures, such as adaptation to structures defined as the relationship between a pronoun and its antecedent. To fill this gap, this paper reviews studies on the learning of referential patterns by asking (1) do people represent referential structures, (2) how long do discourse-level representations last, (3) how specific are representations that are used for referential adaptation, (4) what mechanisms underlie this adaptation, and (5) what the current methods are used to test referential adaptation. This paper also briefly summarises the work on adaptation at other linguistic levels. This line of work extends adaptation to higher-level structures and demonstrates how people learn language patterns that drive successful communication and reading skills.

中文翻译：

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代词理解中的语篇级适应

众所周知，人们会适应语音、词汇和句法层面的统计规律。对语篇级结构的适应知之甚少，例如对定义为代词与其先行词之间关系的结构的适应。为了填补这一空白，本文通过询问（1）人们是否代表指称结构，（2）话语级表征持续多长时间，（3）用于指称的表征有多具体，回顾了关于指称模式学习的研究适应，（4）这种适应背后的机制是什么，以及（5）当前用于测试参考适应的方法是什么。本文还简要总结了其他语言层面的适应工作。