Limits on prediction in language comprehension: A multi-lab failure to replicate evidence for probabilistic pre-activation of phonology

In current theories of language comprehension, people routinely and implicitly predict upcoming words by pre-activating their meaning, morpho-syntactic features and even their specific phonological form. To date the strongest evidence for this latter form of linguistic prediction comes from a 2005 Nature Neuroscience landmark publication by DeLong, Urbach and Kutas, who observed a graded modulation of article- and noun-elicited electrical brain potentials (N400) by the pre-determined probability that people continue a sentence fragment with that word ('cloze'). In a direct replication study spanning 9 laboratories (N=334), we failed to replicate the crucial article-elicited N400 modulation by cloze, while we successfully replicated the commonly-reported noun-elicited N400 modulation. This pattern of failure and success was observed in a pre-registered replication analysis, a pre-registered single-trial analysis, and in exploratory Bayesian analyses. Our findings do not support a strong prediction view in which people routinely pre-activate the phonological form of upcoming words, and suggest a more limited role for prediction during language comprehension

Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension

Do people routinely pre-activate the meaning and even the phonological form of upcoming words? The most acclaimed evidence for phonological prediction comes from a 2005 Nature Neuroscience publication by DeLong, Urbach and Kutas, who observed a graded modulation of electrical brain potentials (N400) to nouns and preceding articles by the probability that people use a word to continue the sentence fragment (‘cloze’). In our direct replication study spanning 9 laboratories (N=334), pre-registered replication-analyses and exploratory Bayes factor analyses successfully replicated the noun-results but, crucially, not the article-results. Pre-registered single-trial analyses also yielded a statistically significant effect for the nouns but not the articles. Exploratory Bayesian single-trial analyses showed that the article-effect may be non-zero but is likely far smaller than originally reported and too small to observe without very large sample sizes. Our results do not support the view that readers routinely pre-activate the phonological form of predictable words

Dissociable effects of prediction and integration during language comprehension: Evidence from a large-scale study using brain potentials

Composing sentence meaning is easier for predictable words than for unpredictable words. Are predictable words genuinely predicted, or simply more plausible and therefore easier to integrate with sentence context? We addressed this persistent and fundamental question using data from a recent, large-scale (N = 334) replication study, by investigating the effects of word predictability and sentence plausibility on the N400, the brain's electrophysiological index of semantic processing. A spatiotemporally fine-grained mixed-effects multiple regression analysis revealed overlapping effects of predictability and plausibility on the N400, albeit with distinct spatiotemporal profiles. Our results challenge the view that the predictability-dependent N400 reflects the effects of either prediction or integration, and suggest that semantic facilitation of predictable words arises from a cascade of processes that activate and integrate word meaning with context into a sentence-level meaning

Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension

Do people routinely pre-activate the meaning and even the phonological form of upcoming words? The most acclaimed evidence for phonological prediction comes from a 2005 Nature Neuroscience publication by DeLong, Urbach and Kutas, who observed a graded modulation of electrical brain potentials (N400) to nouns and preceding articles by the probability that people use a word to continue the sentence fragment (‘cloze’). In our direct replication study spanning 9 laboratories (N=334), pre-registered replication-analyses and exploratory Bayes factor analyses successfully replicated the noun-results but, crucially, not the article-results. Pre-registered single-trial analyses also yielded a statistically significant effect for the nouns but not the articles. Exploratory Bayesian single-trial analyses showed that the article-effect may be non-zero but is likely far smaller than originally reported and too small to observe without very large sample sizes. Our results do not support the view that readers routinely pre-activate the phonological form of predictable words

In dialogue with an avatar, syntax production is identical compared to dialogue with a human partner

The use of virtual reality (VR) as a methodological tool is becoming increasingly popular in behavioural research due to its seemingly limitless possibilities. This new method has not been used frequently in the field of psycholinguistics, however, possibly due to the assumption that humancomputer interaction does not accurately reflect human-human interaction. In the current study we compare participants’ language behaviour in a syntactic priming task with human versus avatar partners. Our study shows comparable priming effects between human and avatar partners (Human: 12.3%; Avatar: 12.6% for passive sentences) suggesting that VR is a valid platform for conducting language research and studying dialogue interactions

How social opinion influences syntactic processing - an investigation using Virtual Reality

Adapting your grammatical preferences to match that of your interlocutor, a phenomenon known as structural priming, can be influenced by the social opinion you have of your interlocutor. However, the direction and reliability of this effect is unclear as different studies have reported seemingly contrary results. When investigating something as abstract as social opinion, there are numerous differences between the studies that could be causing the differing results. We have operationalized social opinion as the ratings of favorability for a wide range of different avatars in a virtual reality study. This way we can accurately determine how the strength of the structural priming effect changes with differing social opinions. . Our results show an inverted U-shaped curve in passive structure repetition as a function of favorability: the participants showed the largest priming effects for the avatar with average favorability ratings, with a decrease when interacting with the least- or most-favorable avatars. This result suggests that the relationship between social opinion and priming magnitude may not be a linear one, contrary to what the literature has been assuming. Instead there is 'happy medium' which evokes the highest priming effect and on either side of this ideal is a decrease in primin

Do we predict upcoming speech content in naturalistic environments?

The ability to predict upcoming actions is a hallmark of cognition. It remains unclear, however, whether the predictive behaviour observed in controlled lab environments generalises to rich, everyday settings. In four virtual reality experiments, we tested whether a well-established marker of linguistic prediction (anticipatory eye movements) replicated when increasing the naturalness of the paradigm by means of immersing participants in naturalistic scenes (Experiment 1), increasing the number of distractor objects (Experiment 2), modifying the proportion of predictable noun-referents (Experiment 3), and manipulating the location of referents relative to the joint attentional space (Experiment 4). Robust anticipatory eye movements were observed for Experiments 1–3. The anticipatory effect disappeared, however, in Experiment 4. Our findings suggest that predictive processing occurs in everyday communication if the referents are situated in the joint attentional space. Methodologically, our study confirms that ecological validity and experimental control may go hand-in-hand in the study of human predictive behaviour

Visual attention influences language processing

Research into the interaction between attention and language has mainly focused on how language influences attention. But how does attention influence language ? Considering we are constantly bombarded with attention grabbing stimuli unrelated to the conversation we are conducting, this is certainly an interesting topic of investigation. In this study we aim to uncover how limiting attentional resources influences language behaviour. We focus on syntactic priming: a task which captures how participants adapt their syntactic choices to their partner. Participants simultaneously conducted a motion - object tracking (MOT) task, a task commonly used to tax attentional re sources. We thus measured participants ’ ability to process syntax while their attention is not - , slightly - , or overly - taxed. We observed an inverted U - shaped curve on priming magnitude when conducting the MOT task concurrently with prime sentences, but no effect when conducted with target sentences. Our results illustrate how, during the prime phase of the syntactic priming task, attention differentially affects syntactic processing whereas during the target phase there is no effect of attention on language behaviour. We explain these results in terms of the implicit learning necessary to prime and how different levels of attention taxation can either impair or enhance the way language is encode