Multiple predictions during language comprehension: Friends, foes, or indifferent companions?

ABSTRACT: To comprehend language, we continually use prior context to pre-activate expected upcoming information, resulting in facilitated processing of incoming words that confirm these predictions. But what are the consequences of disconfirming prior predictions? To address this question, most previous studies have examined unpredictable words appearing in contexts that constrain strongly for a single continuation. However, during natural language processing, it is far more common to encounter contexts that constrain for multiple potential continuations, each with some probability. Here, we ask whether and how pre-activating both higher and lower probability alternatives influences the processing of the lower probability incoming word. One possibility is that, similar to language production, there

SUBMITTER: Brothers T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10783882 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature