How do you know I was about to say “book”? Anticipation processes affect speech processing and lexical recognition

Abstract

Most event-related brain potential (ERP) studies that showed the role of anticipation processes during sentence processing focused on reading. However, in everyday conversation speech unfolds at higher speed; the present study examines whether comprehenders anticipate words when processing auditory sentences. In high-constrained Spanish sentences, we time-locked ERPs on the article preceding the critical noun, which was muted to avoid overlapping effects. Articles that mismatched the gender of the expected nouns triggered an early (200–280 ms) and a late negativity (450–900 ms), suggesting that anticipation processes are at play also during speech processing. A subsequent lexical recognition task revealed that (muted) “expected” words were (falsely) recognised significantly more often than (muted) “unexpected” words, and as often as “old” words that were actually presented. These results suggest that anticipation processes allow creating a memory trace of a word prior to presentation. The findings support a top-down view of spoken sentence comprehension.

Keywords:

• anticipation processes
• speech processing
• spoken word recognition
• ERPs
• top-down information

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ziggy Campbell for his technical advice on the preparation of the audio stimuli and Dr Clara Martin for her useful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Another early negativity was visually observed between 0 and 150 ms but analyses revealed no main effect of Expectation (F(1, 19) = 2.53, p = .13) and no interaction Expectation × Region (F(2, 38) = 0.69, p = .93).

2. Note that participants were not instructed before the listening phase that the second phase of the experiment would be a memory task, which might have reduced their accuracy in the lexical recognition task. Indeed, previous studies have shown that the context of the encoding phase may affect subsequent recognition, and that recognition accuracy rate may be reduced when participants are not clearly instructed to memorise words (Coane & Balota, 2010; Finnigan, Humphreys, Dennis, & Geffen, 2002).

3. Note that the sentences marked by an asterisk mistakenly contain a gender marked adjective that will be replaced for future use.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Government [grant number PSI2011-23033], [grant number CONSOLIDER-INGENIO2010 CSD2007-00048], [grant number ECO2011-25295], [grant number ECO2010-09555-E]; the Catalan Government [grant number SGR 2009-1521]; the 7th Framework Programme [grant number AThEME 613465].