The mechanisms of prediction updating that impact the processing of upcoming word: An event-related potential study on sentence comprehension.

Abstract

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the presence of predictions in language comprehension comes from event-related potential (ERP) studies which show that encountering an adjective whose gender marking is inconsistent with that of a highly expectable noun leads to an effect at the adjective. Until now the mechanism underlying this effect has been unknown. The present study tests a novel hypothesis whereby the effect at adjectives reflects prediction updating, which in turn impacts the N400 generated by the upcoming noun. In two experiments, native speakers of Polish read short stories that made several nouns likely at the position of a direct object in the story's final sentence. The noun was preceded by a gender-marked adjective which was shown in either of the two grammatical forms: a) informative about the following noun (adjectival gender marking constrained which nouns can follow), or b) less informative (the grammatical marking did not disambiguate the gender of the following noun). Importantly, the same stories and critical words were used in both conditions, which was possible thanks to exploiting syncretisms in Polish adjectival inflection. The results provide support for one or more mechanisms of prediction updating at the adjective that impact the amplitude of the N400 elicited by the following noun. Together, these results show that when only morphosyntactic cues are available, they are instantly used to update predictions about upcoming words.

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

“…Yielding further support for prediction revision, we observed that N400 amplitude gradually decreased with the revised predictability of D.S. Fleur, et al Cognition 204 (2020) 104335 the noun after the gender-mismatching article (see also Szewczyk & Wodniecka, 2020). Importantly, our analysis controlled for other relevant influences on N400 amplitude (word length and frequency, word position, semantic similarity to the predicted noun, and plausibility).…”

“…3 This hypothesis, originally coined as a potential explanation of pre-nominal prediction effects reported by Van Berkum et al (2005), is similar in spirit to recent 'prediction updating' proposals about the functional significance of the N400 component (Rabovsky, 2020;Szewczyk & Wodniecka, 2020). However, these proposals take N400 amplitude to index change in a semantic featurebased probabilistic representation of sentence meaning, and do not assume prediction of word form.…”

“…For these reasons, it is possible that Spanish is a more suitable language for eliciting pre-nominal prediction effects than Dutch. Yet different patterns of results may occur in other languages with rich case and gender systems such as German (e.g., Nicenboim, Vasishth, & Rösler, 2020;Schoknecht, Roehm, Schlesewsky, & Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, 2019) or Polish (e.g., Szewczyk & Wodniecka, 2020).…”

“…Once people encounter the article, they use its form to inform their prediction of the noun. This hypothesis was first suggested by Van Berkum et al (2005) to explain prediction effects on pre-nominal adjectives, and has recently been adopted by some authors as a more general explanatory mechanism indexed by N400 amplitude ('semantic prediction updating', Rabovsky, 2020;Rabovsky, Hansen, & McClelland, 2018;Szewczyk & Wodniecka, 2020).…”

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

“…It does raise the question, however, whether listeners reliably or consistently use adjectival inflection information to inform their noun predictions. When a misprediction is evident, people may use the available gender information to revise their initial noun prediction, and perhaps even change their initial prediction to a new noun (as demonstrated by concomitant effects on noun-elicited N400s, e.g., Fleur et al, 2020;Szewczyk & Wodniecka, 2020). However, when evidence for misprediction is less compelling or ambiguous, people might be 'reluctant' to let go of their initial noun prediction (e.g., Nieuwland et al, 2018).…”