Prediction during native and non-native language comprehension: the role of mediating factors

Psycholinguistic evidence suggests that people predict upcoming words during language comprehension. While many studies have addressed what information people predict, less is known about the role of factors that potentially mediate predictive processing. This thesis examines predictions of semantic information and word form information. It investigates whether predictive processing is mediated by availability of cognitive resources and time to generate predictions, and compares predictive processing in native (L1) speakers and non-native (L2) speakers. This thesis presents two major lines of work. Two eye-tracking studies investigate prediction of semantic and word form information using a visual world paradigm. In further two ERP studies, we address the interplay of semantic and word form information in a paradigm which combines both possibilities. Experiments 1 and 2 were an eye-tracking study conducted on L1 and L2 speakers of English. The study has demonstrated that L1 and L2 speakers predict semantic information, but their predictive eye movements are delayed when they are under a cognitive load. The effects of cognitive load on predictive eye movements suggest a role of cognitive resources in language prediction in both L1 and L2 speakers. Experiments 3 and 4 were another eye-tracking study conducted on L1 and L2 speakers. The study has shown that L1 speakers predict word form information, but L2 speakers do not. Experiments 5 and 6 were an ERP study, which investigated the interplay of prediction of semantic and word form information in L1 English speakers. Consistent with the two sets of eye-tracking experiments, L1 speakers predicted both semantic and word form information, but word form was only predicted when sentences were presented at a slower rate, while semantic information was predicted at standard and slow presentation rates. Experiments 7 and 8 used the same method as Experiments 5 and 6, conducted on L2 English speakers. L2 speakers comprehended sentences incrementally, but there was no clear evidence that they predicted semantic information or word form information. Experiments 5 – 8 suggest that prediction of word form information is mediated both by nativeness of the target language and by reading rates. To conclude, both L1 and L2 speakers make predictions, but prediction of semantic information occurs only when there are enough cognitive resources available. Prediction of word form can occur in L1 speakers, but it occurs only when there is enough time available. There is no evidence that L2 speakers predict word form, suggesting a role of nativeness of the target language. The findings are consistent with the production-based prediction model of language prediction, in that prediction of word form is less likely to occur compared to prediction of semantic information. Furthermore, the findings are also consistent with the claim that not everyone makes predictions, and predictions do not always occur. The thesis concludes that prediction is additional processing for the comprehension system, and is not always implicated in the comprehension system

Prediction of phonological and gender information:An event-related potential study in Italian

Do people predict different aspects of a predictable word to the same extent? We tested prediction of phonological and gender information by creating phonological and gender mismatches between an article and a predictable noun in Italian. Native Italian speakers read predictive sentence contexts followed by the expected noun (e.g., un incidente: ‘accident’) or another plausible, but unexpected noun, either beginning with a different phonological class (consonant vs. vowel, e.g., uno scontro: ‘collision’; phonological mismatch) or belonging to a different gender class (e.g., un'inondazione: ‘flooding’; gender mismatch). Phonological mismatch articles elicited greater negativity than expected articles at posterior channels around 450–800 ms post-stimulus. In contrast, gender mismatch articles elicited greater negativity than expected articles at left posterior channels around 250–800 ms. Unexpected nouns showed an N400 effect followed by frontal positivity relative to expected nouns. The earlier effect for the gender mismatch articles suggests that people are quicker or more likely to pre-activate gender information vs. phonological information of a predictable word. We interpret the results with respect to production-based prediction accounts

On predicting form and meaning in a second language

We used event-related potentials (ERP) to investigate whether Spanish−English bilinguals preactivate form and meaning of predictable words. Participants read high-cloze sentence contexts (e.g., “The student is going to the library to borrow a . . .”), followed by the predictable word (book), a word that was form-related (hook) or semantically related (page) to the predictable word, or an unrelated word (sofa). Word stimulus onset synchrony (SOA) was 500 ms (Experiment 1) or 700 ms (Experiment 2). In both experiments, all nonpredictable words elicited classic N400 effects. Form-related and unrelated words elicited similar N400 effects. Semantically related words elicited smaller N400s than unrelated words, which however, did not depend on cloze value of the predictable word. Thus, we found no N400 evidence for preactivation of form or meaning at either SOA, unlike native-speaker results (Ito, Corley et al., 2016). However, non-native speakers did show the post-N400 posterior positivity (LPC effect) for form-related words like native speakers, but only at the slower SOA. This LPC effect increased gradually with cloze value of the predictable word. We do not interpret this effect as necessarily demonstrating prediction, but rather as evincing combined effects of top-down activation (contextual meaning) and bottom-up activation (form similarity) that result in activation of unseen words that fit the context well, thereby leading to an interpretation conflict reflected in the LPC. Although there was no evidence that non-native speakers preactivate form or meaning, non-native speakers nonetheless appear to use bottom-up and top-down information to constrain incremental interpretation much like native speakers do

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.Additional co-authors: Simon Busch-Moreno, Xiao Fu, Jyrki Tuomainen, Eugenia Kulakova, E Matthew Husband, Zdenko Kohút, Shirley-Ann Rueschemeyer, Falk Huetti

Situating language register across the ages, languages, modalities, and cultural aspects: Evidence from complementary methods

In the present review paper by members of the collaborative research center “Register: Language Users' Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation” (CRC 1412), we assess the pervasiveness of register phenomena across different time periods, languages, modalities, and cultures. We define “register” as recurring variation in language use depending on the function of language and on the social situation. Informed by rich data, we aim to better understand and model the knowledge involved in situation- and function-based use of language register. In order to achieve this goal, we are using complementary methods and measures. In the review, we start by clarifying the concept of “register”, by reviewing the state of the art, and by setting out our methods and modeling goals. Against this background, we discuss three key challenges, two at the methodological level and one at the theoretical level: (1) To better uncover registers in text and spoken corpora, we propose changes to established analytical approaches. (2) To tease apart between-subject variability from the linguistic variability at issue (intra-individual situation-based register variability), we use within-subject designs and the modeling of individuals' social, language, and educational background. (3) We highlight a gap in cognitive modeling, viz. modeling the mental representations of register (processing), and present our first attempts at filling this gap. We argue that the targeted use of multiple complementary methods and measures supports investigating the pervasiveness of register phenomena and yields comprehensive insights into the cross-methodological robustness of register-related language variability. These comprehensive insights in turn provide a solid foundation for associated cognitive modeling.Peer Reviewe

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