Anticipating Upcoming Words in Discourse: Evidence From ERPs and Reading Times

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition Vol. 31; no. 3; pp. 443 - 466
• Main Authors: Van Berkum, Jos J. A, Brown, Colin M, Zwitserlood, Pienie, Kooijman, Valesca, Hagoort, Peter
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Psychological Association 01.05.2005
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Brain; Brain Mapping; Cerebral Cortex - physiology; Cognitive Processes; Dominance, Cerebral - physiology; Electroencephalography; Evoked Potentials - physiology; Female; Foreign Countries; Form Classes (Languages); Humans; Language Processing; Male; Nouns; Prediction; Psychological Studies; Reaction Time - physiology; Reading Skills; Sentences; Set (Psychology); Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; Speech Acoustics; Speech Perception - physiology; Verbal Behavior - physiology
• ISSN: 0278-7393
• DOI: 10.1037/0278-7393.31.3.443

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 mismatched the upcoming noun's syntactic gender. Prediction-inconsistent 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.