Prediction failure blocks the use of local semantic context

ABSTRACT

Before accumulation of recent experimental evidence, prediction was thought to be too prone to failure and thus too costly for language comprehension. Although prediction is now widely assumed, questions about the costs of prediction failure and recovery still remain. An event-related potentials study using highly constraining Italian sentence contexts addressed these questions. It manipulated how predictive local contexts were for target nouns after cueing comprehenders to the status of global sentential predictions with article gender congruence. Predictive local contexts reduced target noun N400 amplitude when the preceding article’s gender was congruent with global predictions, but not when gender was incongruent. This suggests that prediction failure impeded the facilitative use of local context for target nouns. Predictive local contexts following gender incongruence also elicited a broader late frontal positivity on target nouns, suggesting further recovery difficulties. Prediction failures, therefore, are not cost-free, and recovery from these failures requires further consideration.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender agreement
• N400
• late frontal positivity
• prediction
• sentence context

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the audience of the 29th annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference for initial feedback on our work. This research was made possible by a research support grant from Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics at the University of Oxford and the St. Hugh’s College Fellows Research Allowance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.