Nieuwland, MS;
Politzer-Ahles, S;
Heyselaar, E;
Segaert, K;
Darley, E;
Kazanina, N;
Von Grebmer Zu Wolfsthurn, S;
... Huttig, F; + view all
(2018)
Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension.
eLife
, 7
, Article e33468. 10.7554/eLife.33468.001.
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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.
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