No abstract

Context-based predictions facilitate speech processing. However, details of predictive processing mechanisms and how factors like language experience shape facilitative processing remain debated. This electroencephalograph study aimed to shed light on these issues by investigating the effect of dialectal experience on lexical prediction. Stimulus sentences were produced in three Mandarin Chinese dialects (home dialect, familiar regional dialect, and unfamiliar regional dialect). Critical nouns varied between strong and weak predictability. Only when listening to the home dialect was an enhanced ERP deflection observed at the transitive verb before a strongly predictable object noun (compared to the weakly predictable condition); the ERP amplitude at the verb correlated significantly with the following noun's predictability. The predictable object nouns elicited a reduced N400 in all three dialects but only an additional reduction in N1 in the home dialect condition. Conjointly, our results suggest that effortful meaning computation may partially underlie anticipatory lexical processing and that language experience modulates the way lexical prediction facilitates the early stage of acoustic/phonological processing (in addition to the later stage of meaning integration).

Musical expertise has been proposed to facilitate speech perception and comprehension in noisy environments. This study further examined the open question of whether musical expertise modulates high‐level lexical‐semantic prediction to aid online speech comprehension in noisy backgrounds. Musicians and nonmusicians listened to semantically strongly/weakly constraining sentences during EEG recording. At verbs prior to target nouns, both groups showed a positivity‐ERP effect (Strong vs. Weak) associated with the predictability of incoming nouns; this correlation effect was stronger in musicians than in nonmusicians. After the target nouns appeared, both groups showed an N400 reduction effect (Strong vs. Weak) associated with noun predictability, but musicians exhibited an earlier onset latency and stronger effect size of this correlation effect than nonmusicians. To determine whether musical expertise enhances anticipatory semantic processing in general, the same group of participants participated in a control reading comprehension experiment. The results showed that, compared with nonmusicians, musicians demonstrated more delayed ERP correlation effects of noun predictability at words preceding the target nouns; musicians also exhibited more delayed and reduced N400 decrease effects correlated with noun predictability at the target nouns. Taken together, these results suggest that musical expertise enhances lexical‐semantic predictive processing in speech‐in‐noise comprehension. This musical‐expertise effect may be related to the strengthened hierarchical speech processing in particular.