Journal
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY-LEARNING MEMORY AND COGNITION
Volume 31, Issue 3, Pages 443-467Publisher
AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC
DOI: 10.1037/0278-7393.31.3.443
Keywords
discourse context; lexical anticipation; prediction-sensitive parsing; grammatical gender; EEG
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The authors examined whether people can use their knowledge of the wider discourse rapidly enough to anticipate specific upcoming words as a sentence is unfolding. In an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment, subjects heard Dutch stories that supported the prediction of a specific noun. To probe whether this noun was anticipated at a preceding indefinite article, stories were continued with a gender-marked adjective whose suffix in mismatched the upcoming noun's syntactic gender. Prediction-inconsistant adjectives elicited a differential ERP effect, which disappeared in a no-discourse control experiment. Furthermore, in self-paced reading, prediction-inconsistent adjectives slowed readers down before the noun. These findings suggest that people can indeed predict upcoming words in fluent discourse and, moreover, that these predicted words can immediately begin to participate in incremental parsing operations.
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