Review
Prediction during language comprehension: Benefits, costs, and ERP components

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2011.09.015Get rights and content

Abstract

Because context has a robust influence on the processing of subsequent words, the idea that readers and listeners predict upcoming words has attracted research attention, but prediction has fallen in and out of favor as a likely factor in normal comprehension. We note that the common sense of this word includes both benefits for confirmed predictions and costs for disconfirmed predictions. The N400 component of the event-related potential (ERP) reliably indexes the benefits of semantic context. Evidence that the N400 is sensitive to the other half of prediction – a cost for failure – is largely absent from the literature. This raises the possibility that “prediction” is not a good description of what comprehenders do. However, it need not be the case that the benefits and costs of prediction are evident in a single ERP component. Research outside of language processing indicates that late positive components of the ERP are very sensitive to disconfirmed predictions. We review late positive components elicited by words that are potentially more or less predictable from preceding sentence context. This survey suggests that late positive responses to unexpected words are fairly common, but that these consist of two distinct components with different scalp topographies, one associated with semantically incongruent words and one associated with congruent words. We conclude with a discussion of the possible cognitive correlates of these distinct late positivities and their relationships with more thoroughly characterized ERP components, namely the P300, P600 response to syntactic errors, and the “old/new effect” in studies of recognition memory.

Highlights

► Prediction has fallen in and out of favor as a likely factor in comprehension. ► Benefits for confirmed predictions and costs for failed predictions are discussed. ► The N400 component of the ERP reliably indexes the benefits of semantic context. ► Late positive ERPs are more likely to reflect the costs of incorrect predictions. ► Parietal and frontal late positivities may index different sorts of cognitive costs.

Section snippets

Prediction in (behavioral) psycholinguistic theory: Fifty years of variable opinion

The standard usage of predict corresponds well to its origins in Latin – pre (before or in front of) plus dicere (to speak) – to declare what will happen in the future. Outside the realm of verbal acts, a great deal of behavior has a predictive quality, from the rapid timing of movements (predicting the trajectory of a moving object in order to catch or avoid it) to slower acts preceded by more deliberate decision-making (installing solar panels in anticipation of higher fossil-fuel costs).

Rapid, graded, and incremental benefits of semantic context

In contrast to the dominant stream of thought among behavioral psycholinguistics in the 1980s and early 1990s, ERP sentence experiments in the same era showed early influences of semantic context on the processing of individual words. In Kutas and Hillyard's (1980a) initial comparisons between semantically congruent and incongruent sentence-final words and in many subsequent studies, the larger negative wave (N400) elicited by the incongruent endings began at roughly 200 ms after visual word

Prediction, surprise, and the P300

The P300 was the first component of the event-related potential (ERP) to attract substantial attention from researchers interested in cognition. An intensive effort from the late 1960s through the late 1970s established this component as a reliable response to unpredictable stimuli in all modalities, via the use of nonlinguistic stimuli (or single words). The P300 is commonly divided into two subcomponents with different scalp distributions: a frontally-maximal P3a elicited when perceptually

Summary

Both ERP and behavioral data strongly support the view that readers and listeners interpret input continuously and incrementally, and that interpretation leads to general expectations about the semantic content that will occur later. After that subsequent input is itself interpreted, it may prove easier or more difficult to integrate with what has come before. However, we reserve the term prediction for a more specific expectation that a particular word will occur at a particular point in the

References (163)

  • E. Courchesne et al.

    Stimulus novelty, task relevance and the visual evoked potential in man

    Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology

    (1975)
  • M. Dambacher et al.

    Frequency and predictability effects on event-related potentials during reading

    Brain Research

    (2006)
  • S. Debener et al.

    What is novel in the novelty oddball paradigm? Functional significance of the novelty P3 event-related potential as revealed by independent component analysis

    Brain Research. Cognitive Brain Research

    (2005)
  • P. Deldin et al.

    Normal N400 in mood disorders

    Biological Psychology

    (2006)
  • M.T. Diaz et al.

    Electrophysiological differentiation of phonological and semantic integration in word and sentence contexts

    Brain Research

    (2007)
  • K.D. Federmeier et al.

    Right words and left words: electrophysiological evidence for hemispheric differences in meaning processing

    Brain Research. Cognitive Brain Research

    (1999)
  • K.D. Federmeier et al.

    A rose by any other name: long-term memory structure and sentence processing

    Journal of Memory and Language

    (1999)
  • K.D. Federmeier et al.

    Multiple effects of sentential constraint on word processing

    Brain Research

    (2007)
  • A.D. Friederici et al.

    Event-related brain potentials during natural speech processing: effects of semantic, morphological, and syntactic violations

    Brain Research. Cognitive Brain Research

    (1993)
  • A.D. Friederici et al.

    Syntactic parsing preferences and their on-line revisions: a spatio-temporal analysis of event-related brain potentials

    Brain Research. Cognitive Brain Research

    (2001)
  • D. Friedman et al.

    The novelty P3: an event-related brain potential (ERP) sign of the brain's evaluation of novelty

    Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews

    (2001)
  • P. Hagoort et al.

    ERP effects of listening to speech: semantic ERP effects

    Neuropsychologia

    (2000)
  • J.C.J. Hoeks et al.

    Seeing words in context: the interaction of lexical and sentence level information during reading

    Brain Research. Cognitive Brain Research

    (2004)
  • B.W. Johnson et al.

    High-density mapping in an N400 paradigm: evidence for bilateral temporal lobe generators

    Clinical Neurophysiology

    (2000)
  • K. Juottonen et al.

    Dissimilar age influences on two ERP waveforms (LPC and N400) reflecting semantic context effects

    Brain Research. Cognitive Brain Research

    (1996)
  • V.A. Kazmerski et al.

    Old/new differences in direct and indirect memory tests using pictures and words in within- and cross-form conditions: event-related potential and behavioral measures

    Brain Research. Cognitive Brain Research

    (1997)
  • A. Kim et al.

    The independence of combinatory semantic processing: evidence from event-related potentials

    Journal of Memory and Language

    (2005)
  • H.H.J. Kolk et al.

    Structure and limited capacity in verbal working memory: a study with event-related potentials

    Brain and Language

    (2003)
  • T.Y. Kuo et al.

    Perceptual difficulty in source memory encoding and retrieval: prefrontal versus parietal electrical brain activity

    Neuropsychologia

    (2008)
  • G. Kuperberg

    Neural mechanisms of language comprehension: challenges to syntax

    Brain Research

    (2007)
  • G.R. Kuperberg et al.

    Electrophysiological distinctions in processing conceptual relationships within simple sentences

    Brain Research. Cognitive Brain Research

    (2003)
  • M. Kutas et al.

    Event-related brain potentials to semantically inappropriate and surprisingly large words

    Biological Psychiatry

    (1980)
  • M. Kutas et al.

    Psycholinguistics electrified II: 1995–2005

  • W.C. McCallum et al.

    The effects of physical and semantic incongruities on auditory event-related potentials

    Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology

    (1984)
  • G.A. Miller et al.

    Some perceptual consequences of linguistic rules

    Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

    (1963)
  • E. Moreno et al.

    Processing semantic anomalies in two languages: an electrophysiological exploration in both languages of Spanish–English bilinguals

    Brain Research. Cognitive Brain Research

    (2005)
  • E.M. Moreno et al.

    Switching languages, switching palabras (words): an electrophysiological study of code switching

    Brain and Language

    (2002)
  • M.C. Anderson et al.

    Remembering can cause forgetting — retrieval dynamics in long-term memory

    Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition

    (1994)
  • Y. Arbel et al.

    The N400 and P300 are not all that independent

    Psychophysiology

    (2011)
  • H. Barber et al.

    Grammatical gender and number agreement in Spanish: an ERP comparison

    Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

    (2005)
  • Bendixen, A., SanMiguel, I., & Schröger, E. (in press). Early electrophysiological indicators for predictive processing...
  • M. Besson et al.

    An event-related potential analysis of incongruity in music and other non-linguistic contexts

    Psychophysiology

    (1987)
  • M. Besson et al.

    An event-related potential analysis of semantic congruity and repetition effects in sentences

    Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

    (1992)
  • I. Bornkessel et al.

    The extended argument dependency model: a neurocognitive approach to sentence comprehension across languages

    Psychological Review

    (2006)
  • S. Brown-Schmidt et al.

    Who do you love, your mother or your horse? An event-related brain potential analysis of tone processing in Mandarin Chinese

    Journal of Psycholinguistic Research

    (2004)
  • G. Cohen et al.

    Word recognition: age differences in contextual facilitation effects

    The British Journal of Psychiatry

    (1983)
  • J.F. Connolly et al.

    Event-related potential components reflect phonological and semantic processing of the terminal words of spoken sentences

    Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

    (1994)
  • S. Coulson et al.

    Expect the unexpected: event-related brain response to morphosyntactic violations

    Language and Cognitive Processes

    (1998)
  • S. Coulson et al.

    Right hemisphere sensitivity to word- and sentence-level context: evidence from event-related brain potentials

    Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition

    (2005)
  • J. Daltrozzo et al.

    Sex differences in two event-related potentials components related to semantic priming

    Archives of Sexual Behavior

    (2007)
  • Cited by (0)

    View full text