Journal
NATURE NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 8, Issue 8, Pages 1117-1121Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/nn1504
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Funding
- NIA NIH HHS [AG08313] Funding Source: Medline
- NICHD NIH HHS [HD22614] Funding Source: Medline
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Despite the numerous examples of anticipatory cognitive processes at micro and macro levels in many animal species, the idea that anticipation of specific words plays an integral role in real-time language processing has been contentious. Here we exploited a phonological regularity of English indefinite articles ('an' precedes nouns beginning with vowel sounds, whereas 'a' precedes nouns beginning with consonant sounds) in combination with event-related brain potential recordings from the human scalp to show that readers' brains can pre-activate individual words in a graded fashion to a degree that can be estimated from the probability that each word is given as a continuation for a sentence fragment offline. These findings are evidence that readers use the words in a sentence ( as cues to their world knowledge) to estimate relative likelihoods for upcoming words.
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