a b s t r a c tWe used ERPs to investigate the pre-activation of form and meaning in language comprehension. Participants read high-cloze sentence contexts (e.g., ''The student is going to the library to borrow a. . ."), followed by a word that was predictable (book), form-related (hook) or semantically related (page) to the predictable word, or unrelated (sofa). At a 500 ms SOA (Experiment 1), semantically related words, but not form-related words, elicited a reduced N400 compared to unrelated words. At a 700 ms SOA (Experiment 2), semantically related words and form-related words elicited reduced N400 effects, but the effect for form-related words occurred in very high-cloze sentences only. At both SOAs, form-related words elicited an enhanced, post-N400 posterior positivity (Late Positive Component effect). The N400 effects suggest that readers can pre-activate meaning and form information for highly predictable words, but form pre-activation is more limited than meaning pre-activation. The post-N400 LPC effect suggests that participants detected the form similarity between expected and encountered input. Pre-activation of word forms crucially depends upon the time that readers have to make predictions, in line with production-based accounts of linguistic prediction.

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Everyday speech is littered with disfluency, often correlated with the production of less predictable words (e.g., Beattie & Butterworth [Beattie, G., & Butterworth, B. (1979). Contextual probability and word frequency as determinants of pauses in spontaneous speech. Language and Speech, 22,[201][202][203][204][205][206][207][208][209][210][211]). But what are the effects of disfluency on listeners? In an ERP experiment which compared fluent to disfluent utterances, we established an N400 effect for unpredictable compared to predictable words. This effect, reflecting the difference in ease of integrating words into their contexts, was reduced in cases where the target words were preceded by a hesitation marked by the word er. Moreover, a subsequent recognition memory test showed that words preceded by disfluency were more likely to be remembered. The study demonstrates that hesitation affects the way in which listeners process spoken language, and that these changes are associated with longer-term consequences for the representation of the message.

We report a study using the "visual-world" paradigm that investigated (1) the timecourse of phonological prediction in English by native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers whose native language was Japanese, and (2) whether the Japanese participants predicted phonological form in Japanese. Participants heard sentences which contained a highly predictable word (e.g., cloud, following The tourists expected rain when the sun went behind the …), and viewed an array of objects containing a target object which corresponded to the predictable word [cloud; Japanese: kumo], an English competitor object whose English name was phonologically related to the predictable word [clown; piero], a Japanese competitor object whose Japanese name was phonologically related to the Japanese translation of the predictable word [bear; kuma], or an object that was unrelated to the predictable word [globe; tikyuugi]. Both L1 and L2 speakers looked predictively at the target object, but L2 speakers were slower than L1 speakers. L1 speakers looked predictively at the English competitor object, but L2 speakers did not do so predictively. Neither group looked at the Japanese competitor object more than the unrelated object. Thus, people can predict phonological information in their native language but may not do so in non-native languages.

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