The processing signature of anticipatory reading: an eye-tracking study on lexical predictions

Arnout Koornneef

doi:10.1515/ling-2021-0014

Abstract

Abstract Current approaches to the human language faculty emphasize that during real-time processing anticipatory mechanisms play a vital role for people to parse and comprehend linguistic input at a sufficient pace. Consistent with this view, several Event-Related Potential (ERP) and behavioral self-paced reading (SPR) studies revealed a processing disadvantage for pre-nominal linguistic elements that (grammatically) mismatched with an expected upcoming noun. More recently, however, these findings have been challenged because the results are difficult to replicate. In the current study, I continue this line of replication research with a complementary method: eye tracking. I conducted two experiments aimed at reproducing prior findings of a SPR study of van Berkum, Jos J. A., Colin M. Brown, Pienie Zwitserlood, Valesca Kooijman & Hagoort Peter. 2005. Anticipating upcoming words in discourse: Evidence from ERPs and reading times. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 31(3). 443–467. The participants read two-sentence stories constructed to elicit a strong lexical prediction about an upcoming noun. To assess whether readers were activating the lexical prediction, the noun was preceded by two gender-inflected adjectives carrying an inflectional suffix that either matched or mismatched with the syntactic gender of the predicted noun. Overall, I did not obtain evidence for strong lexical prediction as the eye-tracking metrics revealed no processing disadvantage for mismatching adjectives (i.e., contrary to the findings of van Berkum et al.). In fact, in some cases readers allocated more processing resources to pre-nominal adjectives that morphologically matched with the gender of the predicted noun. These intriguing findings will be discussed in the context of the time course, the processing costs, and the validation processes of lexical predictions.

Highlights

The notion that people can and routinely will predict upcoming information while processing linguistic input, played only a minor role in the early frameworks on the architecture of the language system
Perhaps the most parsimonious explanation of the data is that the participants did not engage in all-or-none lexical prediction due to the nature of the reading task, allowing a higher reading pace than the tasks of prior studies
It became clear that we cannot rule out all-or-none lexical prediction as a genuine phenomenon in reading, even in the current study

Summary

Introduction

The notion that people can and routinely will predict upcoming information while processing linguistic input, played only a minor role in the early frameworks on the architecture of the language system. In the frameworks on the other end of the spectrum it is argued that for most linguistic predictions to emerge, an (elaborative) inference is warranted (cf Calvo 2001; Estevez and Calvo 2000; George et al 1997; Long and De Ley 2000; Smith and Levy 2008) These inferences do not require deliberate (conscious) processing per se, they are thought to pose a strain on the cognitive resources of readers and listeners . In these latter accounts the preparation of a linguistic prediction should come at a measurable processing cost

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Conclusion