Rational Adaptation in Lexical Prediction: The Influence of Prediction Strength.

Recent studies indicate that the processing of an unexpected word is costly when the initial, disconfirmed prediction was strong. This penalty was suggested to stem from commitment to the strongly predicted word, requiring its inhibition when disconfirmed. Additional studies show that comprehenders rationally adapt their predictions in different situations.

From pre-activation to pre-updating: A threshold mechanism for commitment to strong predictions.

Ample evidence suggests that during sentence processing comprehenders can "pre-activate" lexical/semantic knowledge stored in long-term memory. A relatively recent development suggests that in some cases a stronger form of prediction is employed, involving "pre-updating" the predicted content into the sentence's representation being built in working memory. The current study argues for an activation threshold mechanism by which pre-updating is initiated, within the routine processing stages of a word in a context.

Love thy neighbor: Facilitation and inhibition in the competition between parallel predictions.

Ample evidence suggests that during word recognition and production, simultaneously activated lexical and sublexical representations interact, demonstrating varied patterns of facilitation and inhibition in various tasks and measures. A separate line of research has led to a growing consensus that prediction during sentence processing involves activating multiple possible predictions. However, very little is known about the nature of the interactions between parallel predictions.

Predictive Pre-updating and Working Memory Capacity: Evidence from Event-related Potentials.

It was recently proposed that lexical prediction in sentence context encompasses two qualitatively distinct prediction mechanisms: "pre-activation," namely, activating representations stored in long-term memory, and "pre-updating," namely, updating the sentence's representation, built online in working memory (WM), to include the predicted content [Lau, E. F., Holcomb, P.

Lexical inhibition due to failed prediction: Behavioral evidence and ERP correlates.

During sentence processing, comprehenders form expectations regarding upcoming material, and may even predict a specific word. Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies have shown that disconfirmed predictions elicit a post-N400-positivity (PNP) with two distinct distributions. A frontal-PNP (f-PNP) is elicited when an unexpected but congruent word appears instead of a highly predictable word, whereas an anomalous word elicits a posterior-PNP.

Working Memory in the Processing of Long-Distance Dependencies: Interference and Filler Maintenance.

During the temporal delay between the filler and gap sites in long-distance dependencies, the "active filler" strategy can be implemented in two ways: the filler phrase can be actively maintained in working memory ("maintenance account"), or it can be retrieved only when the parser posits a gap ("retrieval account"). The current study tested whether filler content is maintained during the processing of dependencies. Using a self-paced reading paradigm, we compared reading times on a noun phrase (NP) between the filler and gap sites in object relative clauses, to reading times on an NP between the antecedent and ellipsis sites in ellipsis sentences.