Readers and listeners rely upon previous experience to generate predictions about multiple aspects of an unfolding
linguistic signal. Error signals elicited by unexpected input feed forward to higher-level units, serving in the adjustment of
expectancies and thus increasing the precision of predictions in that context. When a syntactic ambiguity is resolved with a
dis-preferred continuation, a garden-path effect occurs, but decreases in magnitude as a function of exposure to the unexpected
event. But, can readers adjust lower-level expectations about word forms in contexts that do not permit overt higher-level
ambiguity? We monitored eye-movements as participants read expected or unexpected words in highly-constraining sentences.
Half of items contained the predicted word and half contained a plausible but unexpected word. Adaptation—in the form of
decreased fixation duration on unexpected words—was observed on first fixation duration but nowhere else, suggesting that
adaptation occurs at different levels of a multilayered processing system.