Work

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

Year: 2005

Type: article

Abstract: 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.

Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition

DOI: 10.1037/0278-7393.31.3.443

Authors: Jos J. A. Van Berkum, Colin M. Brown, Pienie Zwitserlood, Valesca Kooijman, Peter Hagoort

Institution: University of Amsterdam

Language: English

Topic: Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism

Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience

Field: Neuroscience

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek

Award: G369637727