Prediction in the maze: Evidence for probabilistic pre-activation from the English a/an contrast

Abstract

The idea that comprehenders predict upcoming linguistic content has become core to many theories of language processing. Experimental studies exploiting morphosyntactic and phonotactic constraints on a word form preceding a high cloze target word have been key to underpinning predictive accounts of comprehension, but investigating these tight sequential contrasts with traditional behavioral methods is difficult. The maze task, with its more focal measure of incremental processing, may provide a cheap and easy methodology to study early cues to prediction. An experiment investigating the a/an contrast (DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, 2005; Nieuwland, et al., 2018) using A-maze (Boyce, Futrell, & Levy, 2020) finds that unexpected articles, as well as nouns, elicit slower focal response times. Response times are also shown to be inversely related to noun cloze probabilities, with slower responders showing larger effects of expectation. This study demonstrates that the maze task can be sensitive to expectation and is a useful alternative methodology for investigating prediction in comprehension.

Syntax and prediction in language and music

“…Interestingly, although the role of predictive processing in music perception and production is largely agreed upon and has a long research history (e.g., Huron, 2008;Meyer, 1956), prediction in language has long been neglected and often denied in linguistics, considering the vast number of possible word combinations (e.g., see discussions in Ferreira & Chantavarin, 2018;Huettig, 2015;Huettig & Mani, 2016;and Kutas et al, 2011). However, more recent papers are coming to the conclusion that prediction is a fundamental element of the activation of linguistic representations in the brain (Ferreira & Chantavarin, 2018;Ferreira & Qiu, 2021;Huettig et al, 2022;Husband, 2022), with the caveat that prediction might only occur when there are somewhat constraining circumstances (Huettig et al, 2022).…”