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Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension.

ABSTRACT: Do people routinely pre-activate the meaning and even the phonological form of upcoming words? The most acclaimed evidence for phonological prediction comes from a 2005 Nature Neuroscience publication by DeLong, Urbach and Kutas, who observed a graded modulation of electrical brain potentials (N400) to nouns and preceding articles by the probability that people use a word to continue the sentence fragment ('cloze'). In our direct replication study spanning 9 laboratories (N=334), pre-registered replication-analyses and exploratory Bayes factor analyses successfully replicated the noun-results but, crucially, not the article-results. Pre-registered single-trial analyses also yielded a statistically significant effect for the nouns but not the articles. Exploratory Bayesian single-trial analyses showed that the article-effect may be non-zero but is likely far smaller than originally reported and too small to observe without very large sample sizes. Our results do not support the view that readers routinely pre-activate the phonological form of predictable words.

SUBMITTER: Nieuwland MS

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5896878 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension.

Nieuwland Mante S MS Politzer-Ahles Stephen S Heyselaar Evelien E Segaert Katrien K Darley Emily E Kazanina Nina N Von Grebmer Zu Wolfsthurn Sarah S Bartolozzi Federica F Kogan Vita V Ito Aine A Mézière Diane D Barr Dale J DJ Rousselet Guillaume A GA Ferguson Heather J HJ Busch-Moreno Simon S Fu Xiao X Tuomainen Jyrki J Kulakova Eugenia E Husband E Matthew EM Donaldson David I DI Kohút Zdenko Z Rueschemeyer Shirley-Ann SA Huettig Falk F

eLife 20180403

Do people routinely pre-activate the meaning and even the phonological form of upcoming words? The most acclaimed evidence for phonological prediction comes from a 2005 <i>Nature Neuroscience</i> publication by DeLong, Urbach and Kutas, who observed a graded modulation of electrical brain potentials (N400) to nouns and preceding articles by the probability that people use a word to continue the sentence fragment ('cloze'). In our direct replication study spanning 9 laboratories (<i>N</i>=334), p ...[more]

PMID: 29631695

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Project description:Numerous studies report brain potential evidence for the anticipation of specific words during language comprehension. In the most convincing demonstrations, highly predictable nouns exert an influence on processing even before they appear to a reader or listener, as indicated by the brain's neural response to a prenominal adjective or article when it mismatches the expectations about the upcoming noun. However, recent studies suggest that some well-known demonstrations of prediction may be hard to replicate. This could signal the use of data-contingent analysis, but might also mean that readers and listeners do not always use prediction-relevant information in the way that psycholinguistic theories typically suggest. To shed light on this issue, we performed a close replication of one of the best-cited ERP studies on word anticipation (Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman & Hagoort, 2005; Experiment 1), in which participants listened to Dutch spoken mini-stories. In the original study, the marking of grammatical gender on pre-nominal adjectives ('groot/grote') elicited an early positivity when mismatching the gender of an unheard, highly predictable noun, compared to matching gender. The current pre-registered study involved that same manipulation, but used a novel set of materials twice the size of the original set, an increased sample size (N = 187), and Bayesian mixed-effects model analyses that better accounted for known sources of variance than the original. In our study, mismatching gender elicited more negative voltage than matching gender at posterior electrodes. However, this N400-like effect was small in size and lacked support from Bayes Factors. In contrast, we successfully replicated the original's noun effects. While our results yielded some support for prediction, they do not support the Van Berkum et al. effect and highlight the risks associated with commonly employed data-contingent analyses and small sample sizes. Our results also raise the question whether Dutch listeners reliably or consistently use adjectival inflection information to inform their noun predictions.

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Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension.

Publications

Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension.

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