ReviewPrediction during language comprehension: Benefits, costs, and ERP components
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
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