Abstract
abstractWhile theories on predictive processing posit that predictions are based on one’s prior experiences, experimental work has effectively ignored the fact that people differ from each other in their linguistic experiences and, consequently, in the predictions they generate. We examine usage-based variation by means of three groups of participants (recruiters, job-seekers, and people not (yet) looking for a job), two stimuli sets (word sequences characteristic of either job ads or news reports), and two experiments (a Completion task and a Voice Onset Time task). We show that differences in experiences with a particular register result in different expectations regarding word sequences characteristic of that register, thus pointing to differences in mental representations of language. Subsequently, we investigate to what extent different operationalizations of word predictability are accurate predictors of voice onset times. A measure of a participant’s own expectations proves to be a significant predictor of processing speed over and above word predictability measures based on amalgamated data. These findings point to actual individual differences and highlight the merits of going beyond amalgamated data. We thus demonstrate that is it feasible to empirically assess the variation implied in usage-based theories, and we advocate exploiting this opportunity.
Highlights
Prediction-based processing is such a fundamental cognitive mechanism that it has been stated that brains are essentially prediction machines (Clark, 2013)
The main goal of this paper is to reveal to what extent differences in experience result in different expectations and responses to experimental stimuli, pointing to differences in mental representations of language
The model showed that there are no significant differences between groups in the proportion of responses that correspond to a complement in the Twente News Corpus
Summary
Prediction-based processing is such a fundamental cognitive mechanism that it has been stated that brains are essentially prediction machines (Clark, 2013). The participants who had greater experience with specific phrases could more match the brief, degraded input to a representation in long-term memory, recognize, and report it Note, that these studies do not relate the performance on the experimental tasks to any other data from the participants themselves, and, with the exception of Street and Dąbrowska (2010, 2014), the researchers pay little attention to the degree of variation within each of the groups of participants. The selected sequences were to cover a range of values on two types of corpus-based measures: sequence frequency and surprisal of the final word in the sequence With respect to the former, we took into account the frequency with which the sequence occurs in the specialized corpus (i.e., either the Job ad corpus or the News report corpus) as well as a corpus containing generic data, meant to reflect Dutch readers’ overall experience, rather than one genre. The points obtained by a participant were summed, yielding a stereotypy score ranging from 0 to 100.5
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