Listeners rely on co-occurrence frequencies between verbs and syntactic
structures—verb biases—to disambiguate sentences and listeners dynamically
update their representations of verbs in the face of new evidence about
verb-structure co-occurrence. Yet, little is known about the biological
memory systems that support the use and dynamic updating of verb bias. We
explore this question by testing individuals with deficits in declarative
memory (amnesia), and age-matched healthy participants, in their on-line
interpretation of syntactically ambiguous sentences. We find that patients
and their age-matched counterparts use verb bias in on-line interpretation,
however neither updated these biases in response to recent exposure.