Anticipating Upcoming Words in Discourse: Evidence From ERPs and Reading Times.

Abstract

The authors examined whether people can use their knowledge of the wider discourse rapidly enough to anticipate specific upcoming words as a sentence is unfolding. In an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment, subjects heard Dutch stories that supported the prediction of a specific noun. To probe whether this noun was anticipated at a preceding indefinite article, stories were continued with a gender-marked adjective whose suffix mismatched the upcoming noun's syntactic gender. Predictioninconsistent adjectives elicited a differential ERP effect, which disappeared in a no-discourse control experiment. Furthermore, in self-paced reading, prediction-inconsistent adjectives slowed readers down before the noun. These findings suggest that people can indeed predict upcoming words in fluent discourse and, moreover, that these predicted words can immediately begin to participate in incremental parsing operations.

Event-related brain potentials during the monitoring of speech errors

“…While the picture alone provides information about the content of a potential description, several different sentences including different syntactic structures are possible. The PMNs and the implied prediction mechanism are in accordance with previous work suggesting a prediction mechanism on the basis of verbal material alone (DeLong et al, 2005;Van Berkum et al, 2005;Wicha et al, 2003). 1 We assume that prediction is avoided when speech was taskirrelevant due to the associated processing costs.…”

“…The prediction effects in the above-mentioned studies suggest that predicted words included morphosyntactic (e.g. syntactic gender; Van Berkum et al, 2005;Wicha et al, 2003) and word form information (e.g. phonology; DeLong et al, 2005).…”

“…Furthermore, semantic priming and the syntactic garden-path phenomenon can be seen as prediction or anticipation of upcoming words. Similarly, story completion and the cloze test (Taylor, 1953) are taken to reflect word prediction (see Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman, and Hagoort, 2005 for a detailed discussion; but see also Jackendoff, 2002).…”

“…It has been suggested that language users not only try to narrow the range of expected words, but can, given sufficient context information, predict specific word forms before the words have been presented (DeLong, Urbach, and Kutas, 2005;Van Berkum et al, 2005;Wicha, Bates, Moreno, and Kutas, 2003). In these studies, the question of whether specific word forms were anticipated on-line was tested during the processing of so-called test words that preceded the anticipated word.…”

Tracking the mind during reading: The influence of past, present, and future words on fixation durations.

“…For natural reading, the prediction is that the joint effect of prior-sentence context and parafoveal information serves as a retrieval cue for the parafoveal word: The higher the net predictability of the parafoveal word, the more likely the eyes will stay at the foveal word. The relevance of anticipations in discourse has recently been demonstrated by Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman, and Hagoort (2005) with ERPs and reading times. We propose to go even a step further.…”