There is extensive evidence that listeners use general
knowledge to predict upcoming sentence endings; however,
less is known about how novel information is integrated when
there is disagreement between general knowledge and novel
information. The present studies use the visual world
paradigm to study the semantic competition between new
information and general knowledge. Experiment 1
demonstrates that listeners learn to use limited exposure to
new information and their general knowledge to anticipate
sentence endings that align with the action of the sentence.
Experiment 2 demonstrates participants learn to use
combinatorial information from stories to elicit anticipatory
eye movements to the target over the general knowledge
distractor. Evidence from these experiments indicates even in
the presence of semantic conflict with general knowledge,
listeners rapidly increase the weight of novel information
rather than general knowledge.