Prediction in monolingual comprehension

We have reviewed the rapid recognition of words by listeners and their integration into a syntactic and semantic context during comprehension. When a word is predictable within a sentence, e.g., bath, in the sentence “The tired mother gave her dirty child a bath”, then the predictable word is typically processed more quickly by a listener than a less predictable word (e.g., shower) (Schwanenflugel & Shoben, 1985). One reason for this is that the word bath is easily integrated with the preceding context (i.e., when listeners hear the word bath it quickly makes sense to them). However, comprehension takes place even

more quickly than such a bottom-up route would suggest – and this is because listeners regularly predict what they are about to hear (for a review, see Pickering & Gambi, 2018).

We consider prediction to mean the pre-activation of any aspect of a linguistic representation (i.e. meaning, syntax or form) before the listener hears (or reads) that representation. In other words, when listening to the sentence “The dentist asked the man to open his mouth a little wider”, it is possible to predict the word mouth at different levels – e.g., at the semantic (conceptual) level, at the syntactic level (noun, singular) and at the phonological level (e.g., /maʊθ/). Semantic, syntactic and phonological prediction may thus be viewed as discrete parts in the prediction process, and empirical studies have

demonstrated prediction at each (and sometimes more than one) of these levels. It is important to make a clear distinction between the pre-activation of features of a predictable word, and the rapid integration of a predictable word in a context (as in

Schwanenflugel & Shoben, 1985). Demonstrating that an utterance is predictable is not the same as demonstrating that an utterance has been predicted. To be fully confident that prediction has taken place, a measure needs to be taken before and not after the predictable word is uttered. The psycholinguistic studies included in this review employ methods that make it possible to measure predictive processing before the occurrence of a predictable word in discourse, or else use a design that rules out an integration account as an explanation for their findings (e.g., Federmeier & Kutas, 1999). In Interpreting Studies, prediction is often referred to as anticipation, and theoretical and empirical work has been based on slightly different concepts of prediction (see Section 1.9).

Evidence of prediction during comprehension comes from empirical studies of prediction in monolinguals. In a seminal study, Altmann and Kamide (1999) presented

participants with scenes containing an agent (e.g., a boy) and four objects (e.g., a cake, a train set, a toy car, and a balloon). Participants heard a sentence with a verb that was semantically linked to either only one or all four of the objects in the display, such as “The boy will eat the cake” or “The boy will move the cake”. When participants heard the constraining verb (eat), anticipatory eye movements began towards the cake before noun onset, whereas when they heard the non-constraining verb, they first looked at the cake only after noun onset. This shows that semantic information in the verb (edible) was used to predict the meaning of the noun (an edible object). Further evidence of verb-mediated semantic prediction in monolinguals comes from the visual-world paradigm (Boland, 2005;

Kamide, Altmann, & Haywood, 2003), as well as from studies absent a visual scene (Grisoni, McCormick Miller, & Pulvermüller, 2017). There is also visual-world evidence of the reverse effect, i.e., that linguistic information in a sentence can be used to predict the verb

(Knoeferle, Crocker, Scheepers, & Pickering, 2005).

Federmeier and Kutas (1999) showed prediction of semantic meaning in an ERP study. They had participants read sentences, e.g., “They wanted to make the hotel look like a tropical resort. So, along the driveway, they planted rows of…”). Sentences culminated in a predictable noun (e.g., palms), an unexpected noun from the same semantic category (e.g., pines), or an unexpected noun from a different semantic category (e.g., tulips). Sentences were either very constraining for the predictable word (high cloze), or else slightly

constraining (medium cloze). They found a greater N400 reduction at the expected nouns in the high-cloze than in the medium cloze sentences. Critically, they also found a smaller N400 effect for the within-category unexpected nouns in the high-cloze than in the

medium-cloze sentences, even though the within-category unexpected nouns were rated as

less plausible continuations in the high-cloze context. This implies that prediction, rather than easier contextual integration, facilitated processing.

There is also evidence of syntactic prediction. Wicha, Moreno and Kutas (2004) showed that not only do people predict the meaning of upcoming words, they also predict their grammatical gender. In a matched gender condition, participants read sentences in Spanish that were constraining for a particular word, such as “crown” in, “The prince dreamt about having his father’s throne. He knew that when his father died, he would finally be able to wear the crown for the rest of his life.”³ The sentences contained either the

semantically congruous noun, e.g., la corona (crown, feminine), a semantically incongruous noun of the same gender e.g., la maleta (suitcase, feminine), the semantically congruous noun preceded by the incorrect gender e.g., el corona (crown, masculine) or the

semantically incongruous noun preceded by the incorrect gender e.g., el maleta (suitcase, masculine). They found that semantically incongruent nouns elicited an N400 effect (again suggestive of semantic prediction). Importantly, they also found that unexpected articles generated an enhanced positivity effect compared to expected articles, indicating that readers predicted gender (for prediction of gender, see also: Otten, Nieuwland, & Van Berkum, 2007; Otten & Van Berkum, 2008; Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman, &

Hagoort, 2005).

Several studies provide evidence of prediction of word form. Laszlo & Federmeier (2009) had participants read highly constraining sentences that ended with either a predictable noun, its orthographic neighbour, an orthographically related pseudoword, or

3 Original Spanish sentence: El príncipe soñaba con tener el trono de su padre. El sabía que cuando su padre

an orthographically related illegal string, (e.g., “It was a beautiful summer day, with not a cloud in the sky/spy/smy/skq”) or else with the predictable noun, an unexpected word, an unrelated pseudoword or an unrelated illegal string (e.g., “The genie was ready to grant his third and final wish/clam/horm/rqck.”) They found that orthographic neighbours, be they words, pseudowords, or illegal strings, elicited smaller N400s than orthographically unrelated items, suggesting that orthographic information can be predicted, and that predictions interact with bottom-up processing even before words are recognised (e.g., before pseudowords and illegal strings have been processed for meaning) (see also Kim &

Lai, 2012).

Ito, Pickering and Corley (2018) demonstrated prediction of word form during listening. Participants heard highly constraining sentences, such as, “The tourists expected rain when the sun went behind the cloud but the weather got better later”, and looked at a visual display containing one of either the predictable word (e.g., cloud), a word

phonologically related to the predictable word (e.g., clown) or an unrelated word (e.g., globe). Not only did participants fixate on the predictable object more than on the unrelated object before word onset, they also fixated the phonologically related object more than the unrelated object before word onset. This shows that when listening,

participants may pre-activate not only the meaning, but also the form of a predictable word.