RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Limits on prediction in language comprehension: A multi-lab failure to replicate evidence for probabilistic pre-activation of phonology
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 111807
DO 10.1101/111807
A1 Mante S. Nieuwland
A1 Stephen Politzer-Ahles
A1 Evelien Heyselaar
A1 Katrien Segaert
A1 Emily Darley
A1 Nina Kazanina
A1 Sarah Von Grebmer Zu Wolfsthurn
A1 Federica Bartolozzi
A1 Vita Kogan
A1 Aine Ito
A1 Diane Mézière
A1 Dale J. Barr
A1 Guillaume Rousselet
A1 Heather J. Ferguson
A1 Simon Busch-Moreno
A1 Xiao Fu
A1 Jyrki Tuomainen
A1 Eugenia Kulakova
A1 E. Matthew Husband
A1 David I. Donaldson
A1 Zdenko Kohút
A1 Shirley-Ann Rueschemeyer
A1 Falk Huettig
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/02/25/111807.abstract
AB 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.