Does entropy modulate the prediction of German long-distance verb particles?

Abstract

Language comprehension requires readers to track relationships between words, such as between the verb and particle "turn down". In German, "turn" and "down" may be separated by large amounts of material, delaying full interpretation of the verb. Readers may therefore predict the particle. However, evidence for lexical predictions often concerns only adjacent or near-adjacent words. We present two ERP experiments in which readers could be either highly certain about a long-distance particle’s identity, or where competing particles created uncertainty. Assuming readers were more likely to predict the particle when certainty was high, we measured the cost of violating this prediction. Despite a large sample size and closely controlled lexical competition, it was surprisingly unclear whether certainty affected the N400 and PNP. Although we find no answer to the question of long-distance predictions, the findings are consistent with negative predictions of currentN400 and PNP accounts in a novel construction.