Prediction during language comprehension: Benefits, costs, and ERP components

Stimulus onset asynchrony and the timeline of word recognition: Event-related potentials during sentence reading

“…N400 amplitudes on the article were enhanced when its phonological form mismatched the initial phoneme of the expected, but not yet visible target word (e.g., "an", when "kite" was the high predictability noun). Thus, representations of upcoming words appear to be available before they are visually presented (for similar results, see Otten, Nieuwland, & van Berkum, 2007;Otten & Van Berkum, 2008;Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman, & Hagoort, 2005;Wicha, Bates, Moreno, & Kutas, 2003;Wicha, Moreno, & Kutas, 2004; see also DeLong, Urbach, Groppe, & Federmeier & Kutas, 1999;Federmeier, Wlotko, De Ochoa-Dewald, & Kutas, 2007; but see Van Petten & Luka, 2012, for a discussion).…”

No laughing matter: How the presence of laughing witnesses changes the perception of insults.

“…Moreover, this finding suggests that people not just passively process the incoming sensory signal, but instead actively anticipate and predict what input they will receive. This shows that predictions in language processing are not limited to lexical-semantic predictions (Lau, Holcomb, & Kuperberg, 2013;Mani & Huettig, 2012;Otten, Nieuwland, & Van Berkum, 2007b;Szewczyk & Schriefers, 2013;Van Petten & Luka, 2012) but also include predictions about the specific social context in which the linguistic utterance should be interpreted. This finding generates interesting new ways to think about how people understand and interpret language.…”

Is there a common oscillatory brain mechanism for producing and predicting language?

“…In addition, given the arbitrary relation between form and meaning in the language system (words such ant and mosquito are semantically related but not form related), a semantic neighborhood would not directly map onto an orthographic one, and pre-activation of the visual features of one word would be of no benefit when processing conceptually similar items. In support of such criticism, Van Petten and Luka (2012) and Huettig (2015) indicate that there is no robust evidence in favor of the prediction hypothesis.…”