Definitely saw it coming? The dual nature of the pre-nominal prediction effect

Abstract

In well-known demonstrations of lexical prediction during language comprehension, pre-nominal articles that mismatch a likely upcoming noun's gender elicit different neural activity than matching articles. However, theories differ on what this pre-nominal prediction effect means and on what is being predicted. Does it reflect mismatch with a predicted article, or 'merely' revision of the noun prediction? We contrasted the 'article prediction mismatch' hypothesis and the 'noun prediction revision' hypothesis in two ERP experiments on Dutch mini-story comprehension, with pre-registered data collection and analyses. We capitalized on the Dutch gender system, which marks gender on definite articles ('de/het') but not on indefinite articles ('een'). If articles themselves are predicted, mismatching gender should have little effect when readers expected an indefinite article without gender marking. Participants read contexts that strongly suggested either a definite or indefinite noun phrase as its best continuation, followed by a definite noun phrase with the expected noun or an unexpected, different gender noun phrase ('het boek/de roman', the book/the novel). Experiment 1 (N = 48) showed a pre-nominal prediction effect, but evidence for the article prediction mismatch hypothesis was inconclusive. Informed by exploratory analyses and power analyses, direct replication Experiment 2 (N = 80) yielded evidence for article prediction mismatch at a newly pre-registered occipital region-of-interest. However, at frontal and posterior channels, unexpectedly definite articles also elicited a gender-mismatch effect, and this support for the noun prediction revision hypothesis was further strengthened by exploratory analyses: ERPs elicited by gender-mismatching articles correlated with incurred constraint towards a new noun (next-word entropy), and N400s for initially unpredictable nouns decreased when articles made them more predictable. By demonstrating its dual nature, our results reconcile two prevalent explanations of the pre-nominal prediction effect. review, see Van Petten & Luka, 2012). Arguably the strongest evidence for word anticipation comes from studies using pre-nominal manipulations, which measured behavioral or neural responses to an article or adjective appearing before a noun (for review, see Kutas, DeLong, & Smith, 2011; Pickering & Gambi, 2018; Van Berkum, 2009). Most studies of this type use gender-marking of pre-nominal articles, such as in Spanish and Dutch, and report differential event-related potential (ERP) responses to articles that mismatch the gender of a highly predictable noun, compared with gender-matching articles (e.g., for Dutch, Otten &

Anticipating words during spoken discourse comprehension: A large-scale, pre-registered replication study using brain potentials

“…Instead of the materials used in the original study (VB05), we used a suitable set of stimuli readily available from a previous study (Fleur et al, 2020). This set of materials was created following a similar procedure as that of the original, was larger than that of the original, and had already been normed for cloze probability.…”

“…In a subsequent experiment with written Spanish sentences but without accompanying drawings, Wicha et al (2004) found that gender-mismatching articles elicited a different pattern, namely a positive ERP effect (P600) compared to matching articles. In more recent studies on comprehension of written sentences, gender-mismatch on prenominal articles was associated with N400-like effects, i.e., an enhanced negativity in the typical N400 time window (Dutch: Fleur, Flecken, Rommers, & Nieuwland, 2020;Otten & Van Berkum, 2009;Spanish: Foucart, Martin, Moreno, & Costa, 2014;Martin, Branzi, & Bar, 2018;Molinaro, Gianelle, Caffarra & Martin, 2017), although sometimes with a time course or scalp distribution unlike the typical N400 effects elicited by nouns.…”

“…It is possible that the initial prediction is limited to word meaning, and that people use gender information to evaluate whether the specific word can still appear. The second question is whether effects of gendermismatch reflect the detection of a prediction mismatch or (also) the updating or revision of a prediction (for discussion, see Fleur et al, 2020;Nieuwland et al, 2018). Importantly, aside from these questions about interpretation, a major obstacle to any unitary interpretation of the available results is that qualitatively different types of effects have been obtained with (sometimes very) similar gender-based manipulations (for discussion, see Ito, Martin, & Nieuwland, 2017b;Kochari & Flecken, 2019).…”

“…This is not a trivial issue in a research field where it has long been and still is rather common to select a dependent variable based on visual inspection of low-sample ERP data (Kilner, 2013;Luck & Gaspelin, 2017), a practice that leads to over-estimated effect sizes and higher rates of false positives (e.g., Gelman & Carlin, 2014;Gelman & Loken, 2013;Vasishth, Mertzen, et al, 2018;Vul, Harris, Winkielman & Pashle, 2009). Moving away from ERP analysis based on visual inspection, recent ERP studies on language comprehension have pre-registered data processing steps and statistical analyses, and explicitly distinguish between confirmatory and exploratory analyses (e.g., Coopmans & Nieuwland, 2020;Fleur et al, 2020;Nieuwland et al, 2018;Sassenhagen & Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, 2015).…”

“…The current study aims to replicate previously observed patterns for prediction-mismatching adjective inflections (VB05; OT07). We use a novel set of experimental materials that is twice the size of that in VB05, and based on materials from a recent ERP study on lexical prediction (Fleur et al, 2020). Fleur et al constructed two-sentence mini-stories that either suggested a definite noun phrase (e.g., 'het boek', the book) or an indefinite noun phrase ('een boek', a book) as its most likely continuation.…”