The Effects of Semantic and Syntactic Prediction on Reading Aloud

Abstract

Abstract. Semantic and syntactic prediction effects were investigated in a word naming task using semantic or syntactic contexts that varied between three and six words. Participants were asked to read the contexts silently and name a target word, which was indicated by a color change. Semantic contexts were composed of lists of semantically associated words without any syntactic information. Syntactic contexts were composed of semantically neutral sentences, in which the grammatical category but not the lexical identity of the final word was highly predictable. When the presentation time of the context words was long (1,200 ms), both semantically and syntactically related contexts facilitated reading aloud latencies of target words and syntactically related contexts produced larger priming effects than semantically related contexts in two out of three analyses. When the presentation time was short (200 ms), however, syntactic context effects disappeared, while semantic context effects remained significant. Across the three experiments, longer contexts produced faster response latencies, but longer contexts did not produce larger priming effects. The results are discussed in the context of the extant literature on semantic and syntactic priming and more recent evidence, suggesting that syntactic information constrains single word recognition.

Semantic and Syntactic Predictions in Reading Aloud: Are Good Predictors Good Statistical Learners?

“…We will now summarize and discuss our findings in the context of the extant literature on SL and reading. First of all, we replicated the semantic and syntactic context effects on reading aloud (Gavard & Ziegler, 2022) in an on-line experiment using a large sample of participants (N = 120). Incidentally, this finding nicely demonstrates that reading aloud experiments can be conducted online and produce high-quality results (Fairs & Strijkers, 2021).…”

“…Because all previous studies investigated quite general levels of reading ability (e.g., Arciuli & Simpson, 2011;Misyak & Christiansen, 2012), in the present study, we used a predictive reading task, in which participants could use semantic or syntactic contexts to facilitate the processing of a target word (Gavard & Ziegler, 2022). This task results in semantic and syntactic context effects that allowed us to calculate for each participant a linguistic prediction score (i.e., a semantic or syntactic priming effect).…”

“…To assess the effects of syntactic prediction, they had to read aloud the same target words preceded by a context of syntactically correct sentences (she -likes -this -mouse) compared to syntactically incorrect sentences (this -likes -she -mouse). The design and materials were identical to Experiment 3 of Gavard & Ziegler (2022), except that the current study was run online.…”

“…To measure linguistic predictions, we used our recently developed predictive reading task, which consisted of having participants read aloud words that were preceded by either semantically or syntactically predictive contexts (Gavard & Ziegler, 2022). We have shown that this task produced strong semantic and syntactic context (priming) effects, that is, reading aloud latencies for the final word in a sequence were faster when it was preceded by a semantically related context (doc -cat -rat -rabbit -mouse) than an unrelated context (shirt -flowerplane -table -mouse).…”

“…Note that the target words across all conditions were identical making it possible to measure the effects of making linguistic predictions in a highly controlled fashion. Interestingly, when enough time was given to process the context (~1000 ms per word), syntactic context effects were even larger than semantic context effects despite the fact that syntactic contexts did not make it possible to predict the exact lexical identity of the target word (for discussion see Gavard & Ziegler, 2022).…”