Graded expectations: Predictive processing and the adjustment of expectations during spoken language comprehension.

Abstract

The goal of this study was to investigate the use of the local and global contexts for incoming words during listening comprehension. Local context was manipulated by presenting a target noun (e.g., "cake," "veggies") that was preceded by a word that described a prototypical or atypical feature of the noun (e.g., "sweet," "healthy"). Global context was manipulated by presenting the noun in a scenario that was consistent or inconsistent with the critical noun (e.g., a birthday party). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were examined at the feature word and at the critical noun. An N400 effect was found at the feature word, reflecting the effect of compatibility with the global context. Global predictability and the local feature word consistency interacted at the critical noun: A larger N200 was found to nouns that mismatched predictions when the context was maximally constraining, relative to nouns in the other conditions. A graded N400 response was observed at the critical noun, modulated by global predictability and feature consistency. Finally, post-N400 positivity effects of context updating were observed to nouns that were supported by one contextual cue (global/local) but were unsupported by the other. These results indicate that (1) incoming words that are compatible with context-based expectations receive a processing benefit; (2) when the context is sufficiently constraining, specific lexical items may be activated; and (3) listeners dynamically adjust their expectations when input is inconsistent with their predictions, provided that the inconsistency has some level of support from either the global or the local context.