Current theories of language processing emphasize prediction as a mechanism to facilitate comprehension, which contrasts with the state of the field a few decades ago, when prediction was rarely mentioned. We argue that the field of psycholinguistics would benefit from revisiting these earlier theories of comprehension that attempted to explain integration and the processes underlying the formation of rich representations of linguistic input and that emphasized informational newness over redundancy. We suggest further that integration and anticipation may be complementary mechanisms that operate on elaborated, coherent discourse representations, supporting enhanced comprehension and memory. In addition, the traditional emphasis on language as a tool for communication implies that much linguistic content will be nonredundant; moreover, the purpose of anticipation is probably not to permit the prediction of exact lexical or syntactic forms but instead to induce a state of preparedness that allows the comprehender to be receptive to new information, thus facilitating its processing.

In recent years, a growing number of studies have used cortical tracking methods to investigate auditory language processing. Although most studies that employ cortical tracking stem from the field of auditory signal processing, this approach should also be of interest to psycholinguistics—particularly the subfield of sentence processing—given its potential to provide insight into dynamic language comprehension processes. However, there has been limited collaboration between these fields, which we suggest is partly because of differences in theoretical background and methodological constraints, some mutually exclusive. In this article, we first review the theories and methodological constraints that have historically been prioritized in each field and provide concrete examples of how some of these constraints may be reconciled. We then elaborate on how further collaboration between the two fields could be mutually beneficial. Specifically, we argue that the use of cortical tracking methods may help resolve long-standing debates in the field of sentence processing that commonly used behavioral and neural measures (e.g., ERPs) have failed to adjudicate. Similarly, signal processing researchers who use cortical tracking may be able to reduce noise in the neural data and broaden the impact of their results by controlling for linguistic features of their stimuli and by using simple comprehension tasks. Overall, we argue that a balance between the methodological constraints of the two fields will lead to an overall improved understanding of language processing as well as greater clarity on what mechanisms cortical tracking of speech reflects. Increased collaboration will help resolve debates in both fields and will lead to new and exciting avenues for research.

Speech disfluencies such as repeated words and pauses provide information about the cognitive systems underlying speech production. Understanding whether older age leads to changes in speech fluency can therefore help characterize the robustness of these systems over the life span. Older adults have been assumed to be more disfluent, but current evidence is minimal and contradictory. Particularly noteworthy is the lack of longitudinal data that would help establish whether a given individual's disfluency rates change over time. This study examines changes in disfluency rates through a sequential design with a longitudinal component, involving the analysis of 325 recorded interviews conducted with 91 individuals at several points in their lives, spanning the ages of 20-94 years. We analyzed the speech of these individuals to assess the extent to which they became more disfluent in later interviews. We found that, with older age, individuals spoke more slowly and repeated more words. However, older age was not associated with other types of disfluencies such as filled pauses (uh's and um's) and repairs. Overall, this study provides evidence that, although age itself is not a strong predictor of disfluencies, age leads to changes in other speech characteristics among some individuals (i.e., speech rate and indicators of lexical and syntactic complexity), and those changes in turn predict the production of disfluencies over the life span. These findings help resolve previous inconsistencies in this literature and set the stage for future experimental work on the cognitive mechanisms underlying changes in speech production in healthy aging. Public Significance StatementThis study measures changes in speech fluency over the life span sequentially using a novel corpus of 91 individuals interviewed at multiple times in their lives. We found that, while older adults spoke more slowly and repeated more words, they were not more likely to produce filled pauses (uh's and um's) and repairs. Overall, we suggest that age is not as strong a predictor of disfluencies as are other individual differences in speech characteristics.

Sudden out-of-hospital-cardiac-arrest (OHCA) following recreational inhalant use is well documented in the literature. The present case study reports the long-term neuropsychological sequelae of a 14-year-old girl who suffered an OHCA secondary to recreational butane gas inhalation. The patient was assessed on day-13 as an inpatient, and again at 3- and 12-month outpatient follow-ups. Acutely the patient demonstrated significant impairment on tasks associated with verbal and non-verbal memory and executive functioning. Re-testing at 3-months post-acute state suggested improved executive and non-verbal functions while showing continued deficits in verbal memory. At 12-months she was cognitively performing at levels expected for her age. This case is reported for its rarity in successfully being able to track the patient's clinical course from hospital discharge to the successful reintegration back into school and community settings.