Lexical prediction in a low predictive validity context
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2020-06-15
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en
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Though it is well established that comprehenders sometimes predict upcoming words during language comprehension, there is still much debate on whether predictive processing is under strategic control. It has been hypothesized that an efficient comprehender may shift away from anticipatory processing when this is not beneficial or relevant for the task at hand (e.g., Brothers et al., 2017, 2019). In this ERP study, we investigated whether comprehenders still predict upcoming words when the probability of prediction success is relatively low. To this end, we looked at the size of the N400 effect to articles that matched or mismatched in gender with a highly expected noun, within an experimental context for which 75% of the trials contained unexpected sentence continuations. We hypothesized that if prediction strength is strategically adapted based on the probability of prediction success, then the effect of article expectedness should diminish over the course of the experiment and possibly disappear altogether. Whilst our pre-registered analyses yielded inconclusive results, our exploratory analyses suggested that prediction effects may increase over time, primarily due to more negative amplitudes to unexpected articles. This finding does not seem to support a strategic prediction account. Instead, we argue that participants may have started to more actively update their noun prediction upon encountering an unexpected article.
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