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

Elife. 2018 Apr 3:7:e33468. doi: 10.7554/eLife.33468.

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.

Keywords: N400; human; language comprehension; neuroscience; prediction.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Adolescent
  • Adult
  • Attention / physiology*
  • Bayes Theorem*
  • Brain / physiology*
  • Comprehension / physiology*
  • Evoked Potentials
  • Humans
  • Language*
  • Probability
  • Reading*
  • Young Adult