This study aimed to explore the temporal dynamics of the consistency effect in reading Chinese phonograms. High-consistency and low-consistency characters were used in the homophone judgment task, and the event-related potentials were recorded. The data showed that low-consistency characters elicited greater N170 amplitude in the temporal-occipital region and greater P200 amplitude in the frontal region than high-consistency characters, whereas high-consistency characters showed greater amplitude of the N400 negativity than low-consistency characters. These findings can be interpreted as indicating that low-consistency characters produce a greater activation for the initial analysis of the orthographical and phonological representations, whereas high-consistency characters involve a greater lexical competition in the later stage.

Current psycholinguistic research generally acknowledges that aspects of sentence comprehension benefit from neural preactivation of different types of information. However, despite strong support from a number of studies, routine specific word form preactivation has been challenged by Ito, Corley, Pickering, Martin, and Nieuwland (2016). They suggest that word form prediction is contingent upon having enough processing time and resources (afforded by slower input rates) to progress through unidirectional, productionlike stages of comprehension to arrive at word forms via semantic feature preactivation. This conclusion is based on findings from their ERP study, which used a related anomaly paradigm and reported form preactivation at a slow (700 ms) word presentation rate but not a faster one (500 ms). The present experimental design is a conceptual replication of Ito et al. (2016), testing young adults by measuring ERP amplitudes to unpredictable words related either semantically/associatively or orthographically to predictable sentence continuations, relative to unrelated continuations. Results showed that, at a visual presentation rate of two words per second, both types of related words show similarly reduced N400s, as well as varying degrees of increased posterior post‐N400 positivity. These findings indicate that word form preactivation during sentence comprehension is detectable along a similar time course as semantic feature preactivation, and such processing does not necessarily require additional time beyond that afforded by near‐normal reading rates.

In 2005, we reported evidence indicating that upcoming phonological word forms—e.g., kite vs. airplane—were predicted during reading. We recorded brainwaves (electroencephalograms [EEGs]) as people read word-by-word and then correlated the predictability in context of indefinite articles that preceded nouns (a kite vs. an airplane) with the average event-related brain potentials (ERPs) they elicited [K. A. DeLong, T. P. Urbach, M. Kutas, Nat. Neurosci. 8, 1117–1121 (2005)]. Amid a broader controversy about the role of word-form prediction in comprehension, those findings were recently challenged by a failed putative direct replication attempt [M. S. Nieuwland et al., eLife 7, e33468 (2018); nine labs, one experiment, and 2.6e4 observations]. To better understand the empirical justification for positing an association between prenominal article predictability and scalp potentials, we conducted a wide-ranging exploratory data analysis (EDA), pooling our original data with extant data from two followup studies (one lab, three experiments, and 1.2e4 observations). We modeled the time course of article predictability in the single-trial data by fitting linear mixed-effects regression (LMER) models at each time point and scalp location spanning a 3-s interval before, during, and after the article. Model comparisons based on Akaike information criteria (AIC) and slope-regression ERPs [rERPs; N. J. Smith, M. Kutas, Psychophysiology 52, 157–168 (2015)] provide substantial empirical support for a small positive association between article predictability and scalp potentials approximately 300 to 500 ms after article onset, predominantly over bilateral posterior scalp. We think this effect may reasonably be attributed to prediction of upcoming word forms.

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