Lexical prediction in language comprehension: a replication study of grammatical gender effects in Dutch

Figures & data

Table 1. Summary of lexical prediction studies, reporting ERPs on predicted noun gender mismatch.

Study	Manipulation	Polarity	Latency	Topography
Wicha, Bates et al. (2003)	Spanish gender marked articles, presented auditorily, timelocked to onset of the article	Negativity	300–500 ms	Significant across all electrodes; interaction showing stronger effect over frontal and medial sites
Wicha, Moreno et al. (2003)	Spanish gender marked articles, presented visually word by word, timelocked to onset of the article	Negativity	300–600 (700) ms	Significant across all electrodes
Wicha et al. (2004)	Spanish gender marked articles, presented visually word by word, timelocked to onset of the article	Positivity	500–700 ms	Significant across all electrodes, statistically marginally stronger effect over the left hemisphere
Van Berkum et al. (2005), Exp. 1	Dutch gender marked adjectives, presented auditorily, timelocked to the acoustic onset of the inflection at the adjective	Positivity	50–250 ms	Significant across all electrodes
Otten et al. (2007)	Dutch gender marked adjectives, presented auditorily, timelocked to the onset of the adjective	Negativity	300–600 ms	Significant for right frontal quadrant only
Otten and Van Berkum (2008), Exp 1B	Dutch gender marked adjectives, presented visually word by word, timelocked to the onset of the adjective	Negativity	900–1100 ms	Significant across all electrodes
Otten and Van Berkum (2009)	Dutch gender marked definite determiners, presented visually word by word, timelocked to the onset of the determiner	Negativity	200–600 ms	Significant across all electrodes; interaction with hemisphere showing stronger effect over right hemisphere
Szewczyk and Schriefers (2013)	Polish gender/animacy-marked adjectives, presented visually word-by-word, timelocked to the onset of the adjective	Negativity	400–600 ms	Significant across all electrodes; interaction showing centro-posterior distribution

Table 2. Examples of stimulus materials used in our experiment.

Prediction-consistent determiner	Prediction-inconsistent determiner
Nadat hij uren naar het lege doek had gekeken voelde de schilder inspiratie opkomen. Hij greep naar de intensief gebruikte kwast en smeet de verf op het doek. After hours of looking at the blank canvas, inspiration finally struck the painter. He reached for thecom heavily used brushcom and threw the paint on the canvas.	Nadat hij uren naar het lege doek had gekeken voelde de schilder inspiratie opkomen. Hij greep naar het intensief gebruikte penseel en smeet de verf op het doek. After hours of looking at the blank canvas, inspiration finally struck the painter. He reached for theneu heavily used pencilneu and threw the paint on the canvas.
Het was een prachtige zonnige dag en Thomas en zijn vrienden wilden gaan picknicken. Ze gingen naar het grote aangename park om daar de middag door te brengen. It was a beautiful sunny day and Thomas and his friends wanted to go on a picnic. They went to theneu big pleasant parkneu to spend the afternoon there.	Het was een prachtige zonnige dag en Thomas en zijn vrienden wilden gaan picknicken. Ze gingen naar de grote aangename speeltuin om daar de middag door te brengen. It was a beautiful sunny day and Thomas and his friends wanted to go on a picnic. They went to thecom big pleasant playgroundcom to spend the afternoon there.

Note: The critical determiner and noun are marked in bold.

Figure 1. ERPs elicited by target determiners in the expected (black line) and unexpected (c) conditions on individual channels. NB: negative polarity is plotted downwards.

Figure 2. Topographic distribution of the difference between ERP amplitudes in the expected and unexpected conditions for target determiners, in the time-window 200–600 ms. The figure shows the ERP voltage of the unexpected determiner minus the expected determiner.

Figure 3. Results from the replication BF test. The dotted line represents the prior based on the effect size observed by O&vB, whereas the solid line represents the posterior belief in the alternative hypothesis after taking into account our observed effect. The grey dots represent believability of H₀ before and after our data is taken into account. BF_r0 is the ratio of the believability of H₀ before and after our data is taken into account, it only slightly decreases with our data taken into account.

Figure 4. ERPs elicited by target nouns in the expected (black line) and unexpected (red line in online version, gray line in print version) conditions on individual channels. NB: negative polarity is plotted downwards.

Figure 5. Topographic distribution of the difference between ERP amplitudes in the expected and unexpected conditions for target nouns, in the time-window 300–500 ms. The figure shows the ERP voltage of the unexpected noun minus the expected noun.

Wicha, N. Y. Y., Bates, E. A., Moreno, E. M., & Kutas, M. (2003). Potato not pope: Human brain potentials to gender expectation and agreement in Spanish spoken sentences. Neuroscience Letters, 346(3), 165–168. doi: 10.1016/S0304-3940(03)00599-8

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Wicha, N. Y. Y., Moreno, E. M., & Kutas, M. (2003). Expecting gender: An event related brain potential study on the role of grammatical gender in comprehending a line drawing within a written sentence in spanish. Cortex, 39(3), 483–508. doi: 10.1016/S0010-9452(08)70260-0

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Wicha, N. Y. Y., Moreno, E. M., & Kutas, M. (2004). Anticipating words and their gender: An event-related brain potential study of semantic integration, gender expectancy, and gender agreement in Spanish sentence reading. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16(7), 1272–1288. doi: 10.1162/0898929041920487

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Van Berkum, J. J. A., Brown, C. M., Zwitserlood, P., Kooijman, V., & Hagoort, P. (2005). Anticipating upcoming words in discourse: Evidence from ERPs and reading times., Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31(3), 443–467. doi: 10.1037/0278-7393.31.3.443

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Otten, M., Nieuwland, M. S., & Van Berkum, J. J. (2007). Great expectations: Specific lexical anticipation influences the processing of spoken language. BMC Neuroscience, 8(1), 89. doi: 10.1186/1471-2202-8-89

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Otten, M., & Van Berkum, J. J. A. (2008). Discourse-based word anticipation during language processing: Prediction or priming? Discourse Processes, 45(6), 464–496. doi: 10.1080/01638530802356463

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Otten, M., & Van Berkum, J. J. A. (2009). Does working memory capacity affect the ability to predict upcoming words in discourse? Brain Research, 1291, 92–101. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2009.07.042

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Szewczyk, J. M., & Schriefers, H. (2013). Prediction in language comprehension beyond specific words: An ERP study on sentence comprehension in Polish. Journal of Memory and Language, 68(4), 297–314. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2012.12.002

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