A Look around at What Lies Ahead: Prediction and Predictability in Language Processing

Kutas, Marta; DeLong, Katherine A.; Smith, Nathaniel J.

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195395518.003.0065

Cited by 195 publications

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References 91 publications

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“…People regularly use contextual information and world knowledge to predict aspects of language that are likely to be mentioned as a sentence or discourse unfolds (e.g., Altmann & Kamide, 1999;Federmeier, 2007;Huettig, 2015;Kutas, DeLong, & Smith, 2011). Prediction is often hypothesized to occur via a so-called pre-activation mechanism, whereby some aspects of word meaning, grammar or form are activated before the onset of the predicted word (e.g., DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, 2005;Federmeier & Kutas, 1999;Laszlo & Federmeier, 2009;Otten, Nieuwland, & Van Berkum, 2007;Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman, & Hagoort, 2005).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting form and meaning: Evidence from brain potentials

Ito

Corley

Pickering

et al. 2016

Journal of Memory and Language

132

187

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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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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting form and meaning: Evidence from brain potentials

Ito

Corley

Pickering

et al. 2016

Journal of Memory and Language

132

187

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“…Evidence has been accumulating that the brain should be viewed as a "prediction machine" (Clark, 2013) that anticipates what will happen next (Bar, 2009;Den Ouden et al, 2012;Friston, 2010;Lupyan and Clark, 2015;Rao and Ballard, 1999). This approach has been productively applied to the field of language processing, with recent findings indicating that the efficiency of language processing emerges in part from the use of prediction by adults and even children, and during both reading and listening (e.g., Altmann and Kamide, 1999;Kamide et al, 2003;Kutas et al, 2011;Mani and Huettig, 2012;Misyak et al, 2010;Garrod, 2004;Pickering and Garrod, 2013;Smith and Levy, 2013;Van Berkum et al, 2005;Wicha et al, 2003;see Kuperberg and Jaeger, 2016;Staub, 2015, for recent reviews). By conducting a whole-brain analysis of functional activation as a function of syntactic surprisal, the present study provided the opportunity to begin to study predictive processing for syntax using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the context of natural reading.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language structure in the brain: A fixation-related fMRI study of syntactic surprisal in reading

et al. 2016

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How is syntactic analysis implemented by the human brain during language comprehension? The current study combined methods from computational linguistics, eyetracking, and fMRI to address this question. Subjects read passages of text presented as paragraphs while their eye movements were recorded in an MRI scanner. We parsed the text using a probabilistic context-free grammar to isolate syntactic difficulty. Syntactic difficulty was quantified as syntactic surprisal, which is related to the expectedness of a given word's syntactic category given its preceding context. We compared words with high and low syntactic surprisal values that were equated for length, frequency, and lexical surprisal, and used fixation-related (FIRE) fMRI to measure neural activity associated with syntactic surprisal for each fixated word. We observed greater neural activity for high than low syntactic surprisal in two predicted cortical regions previously identified with syntax: left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and less robustly, left anterior superior temporal lobe (ATL). These results support the hypothesis that left IFG and ATL play a central role in syntactic analysis during language comprehension. More generally, the results suggest a broader cortical network associated with syntactic prediction that includes increased activity in bilateral IFG and insula, as well as fusiform and right lingual gyri.© 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords:Language Syntax Surprisal Reading Eye movements fMRI IntroductionA complete theory of the human brain must include a description of the neural networks responsible for language processing. Comprehension of connected sentences requires the ability to retrieve words from the lexicon and relate those words to each other, as the input is encountered in real time. The system for creating these groupings is known as syntax, and is generally thought of as a set of computations specifying syntactic categories such as noun and verb, and stating how those categories combine into increasingly larger constituents such as noun phrases, verb phrases, and clauses. The constituent structure of a sentence is the frame on which interpretations are built; the same words will have radically different meanings depending on that structure (e.g., the dog bit the man vs. the man bit the dog). Thus, the human ability to understand language is based both on lexical knowledge and syntactic computations.In this study, we focused on understanding how the human brain implements the syntactic component of the human language faculty. Specifically, we were interested in the nature of the cortical systems that compute syntactic representations during online language comprehension. Three regions have traditionally been identified as candidates for syntactic processing (Fedorenko et al., 2012;Friederici and Kotz, 2003;Grodzinsky and Friederici, 2006;Kaan and Swaab, 2002). Historically, Broca's area or left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) has been most associated with syntax (Ben-Shachar et al., 2003;Ben-Shachar et al., 2004;...

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“…For example, the readiness potential, that indexes the preparation of motor responses, is present from about 500ms prior the observation of a predictable hand action (Kilner et al, 2004). Similarly, comprehenders often predict language (e.g,, Altmann & Kamide, 1999;Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman, & Hagoort, 2005;see Huettig, Rommers, & Meyer, 2011;Kutas, DeLong, & Smith, 2011;Pickering & Garrod, 2007;Van Petten & Luka, 2012 for reviews and discussion). For example, readers experience difficulty (i.e., enhanced N400) when the form of the indefinite article in English is not consistent with the initial phoneme of a highly expected noun (e.g., "an" when the expected noun begins with a consonant; DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, 2005), indicating that phonological features of an upcoming word can be predicted.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Researchers have proposed different mechanisms (Kutas, et al, 2011;Levy, 2008;Pickering & Garrod, 2007. In this paper, our aim is to answer one general question about the nature of such mechanisms, that is: To what extent are the mechanisms used for prediction related to the mechanisms used when preparing to speak?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How do speakers coordinate? Evidence for prediction in a joint word-replacement task

Gambi

Cop

Pickering

2015

Cortex

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We investigated whether speakers represent their partners' task in a joint naming paradigm. Two participants took turns in naming pictures; occasionally the (initial) picture was replaced by a different picture (target), signalling that they had to stop naming the initial picture. When the same participant had to name the target picture, he or she completed the name of the initial picture more often than when neither participant had to name the target picture. Crucially, when the other participant had to name the target picture, the first participant also completed the name of the initial picture more often than when neither participant named the target picture. However, the tendency to complete the initial name was weaker when the other participant had to name the target than when the same participant went on to name the target. We argue that speakers predict that their partner is about to respond using some, but not all, of the mechanisms they use when they prepare to speak.

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A Look around at What Lies Ahead: Prediction and Predictability in Language Processing

Cited by 195 publications

References 91 publications

Predicting form and meaning: Evidence from brain potentials

Predicting form and meaning: Evidence from brain potentials

Language structure in the brain: A fixation-related fMRI study of syntactic surprisal in reading

How do speakers coordinate? Evidence for prediction in a joint word-replacement task

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