18 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Cory Shain, Clara Meister, Tiago Pimentel, Ryan Cotterell + 1 more
Title: Significance The difficulty of comprehending words in context is related to their predictability, but what cognitive processes do these predictability effects reflect? In one view, predictability effects reflect facilitation due to anticipatory processing of predictable words. This view predicts a linear effect…
Yana Arkhipova, Alessandro Lopopolo, Shravan Vasishth, Milena Rabovsky
The N400 component of ERPs is modulated by how predictable a word is, but predictability is usually quantified with lexical cloze—the probability that readers supply that exact word in offline sentence completion tasks. This form-based metric is at odds with decades of evidence that the N400 is primarily sensitive to…
Adrielli Lopes Rego, Joshua Snell, Martijn Meeter
Although word predictability is commonly considered an important factor in reading, sophisticated accounts of predictability in theories of reading are yet lacking. Computational models of reading traditionally use cloze norming as a proxy of word predictability, but what cloze norms precisely capture remains unclear.…
Roslyn Wong, Erik D. Reichle, Aaron Veldre
Historically, prediction during reading has been considered an inefficient and cognitively expensive processing mechanism given the inherently generative nature of language, which allows upcoming text to unfold in an infinite number of possible ways. This article provides an accessible and comprehensive review of the…
Sathvik Nair, Byung-Doh Oh
How predictable a word is can be quantified in two ways: using human responses to the cloze task or using probabilities from language models (LMs). When used as predictors of processing effort, LM probabilities outperform probabilities derived from cloze data. However, it is important to establish that LM probabilities…
James A. Michaelov, Megan D. Bardolph, Cyma K. Van Petten, Benjamin K. Bergen + 1 more
'Benjamin K. Bergen' 'Seana Coulson'] Title: Abstract Theoretical accounts of the N400 are divided as to whether the amplitude of the N400 response to a stimulus reflects the extent to which the stimulus was predicted, the extent to which the stimulus is semantically similar to its preceding context, or both. We use…
Andrea Gregor de Varda, Marco Marelli, Simona Amenta
We release a database of cloze probability values, predictability ratings, and computational estimates for a sample of 205 English sentences (1726 words), aligned with previously released word-by-word reading time data (both self-paced reading and eye-movement records; Frank et al., Behavior Research Methods, 45(4)…
Jieun Song, Byungjun Kim, Minjeong Kim, Paul Iverson
Purpose: The aim of this study was to develop and validate a large Korean sentence set with varying degrees of semantic predictability that can be used for testing speech recognition and lexical processing. Method: Sentences differing in the degree of final-word predictability (predictable, neutral, and anomalous) were…
Anastasiya Lopukhina, Konstantin Lopukhin, Anna Laurinavichyute, Claudio Mulatti
'Claudio Mulatti'] During reading or listening, people can generate predictions about the lexical and morphosyntactic properties of upcoming input based on available context. Psycholinguistic experiments that study predictability or control for it conventionally rely on a human-based approach and estimate…
Shaorong Yan, Gina R. Kuperberg, T. Florian Jaeger
The extent to which language processing involves prediction of upcoming inputs remains a question of ongoing debate. One important data point comes from 17 who reported that an N400-like event-related potential correlated with a probabilistic index of upcoming input. This result is often cited as evidence for gradient…
Pratik Bhandari, Vera Demberg, Jutta Kray
Previous studies have shown that at moderate levels of spectral degradation, semantic predictability facilitates language comprehension. It is argued that when speech is degraded, listeners have narrowed expectations about the sentence endings; i.e., semantic prediction may be limited to only most highly predictable…
Ryan J. Hubbard, Kara D. Federmeier
Predicting upcoming stimuli and events is a critical function of the brain, and understanding the mechanisms of prediction has thus become a central topic in neuroscientific research. Language provides a fertile testing ground for examining predictive mechanisms, as comprehenders use context to predict different…
James A. Michaelov, Seana Coulson, Benjamin Bergen
—More predictable words are easier to process—they are read faster and elicit smaller neural signals associated with processing difficulty, most notably, the N400 component of the event-related brain potential. Thus, it has been argued that prediction of upcoming words is a key component of language comprehension, and…
Sophie Jano, Zachariah Cross, Alex Chatburn, Matthias Schlesewsky + 1 more
The extent to which the brain predicts upcoming information during language processing remains controversial. To shed light on this debate, the present study reanalysed Nieuwland and colleagues’ (2018) replication of 21. Participants (N = 356) viewed sentences containing articles and nouns of varying predictability…
Nikola Kölbl, Konstantin Tziridis, Andreas Maier, Thomas M. Kinfe + 3 more
Predictive coding theory suggests that the brain continuously anticipates upcoming words to optimize language processing, but the neural mechanisms remain unclear, particularly in naturalistic speech. Here, we simultaneously recorded EEG and MEG data from 29 participants while they listened to an audio book and…
Shiva Upadhye, Richard Futrell
Contextual predictability shapes both the form and choice of words in online language production. The effects of the predictability of a word given its previous context are generally well-understood in both production and comprehension, but studies of naturalistic production have also revealed a poorly-understood…
Lorenzo Pacchiardi, Konstantinos Voudouris, Ben Slater, Fernando Martínez‐Plumed + 3 more
'Fernando Martínez‐Plumed' 'José Hernández‐Orallo' 'Lexin Zhou' 'Wout Schellaert'] Despite possessing impressive skills, Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail unpredictably, demonstrating inconsistent success in even basic common sense reasoning tasks. This unpredictability poses a significant challenge to ensuring…
Kevin Tang, Jason A. Shaw
The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend to occur in less predictable environments. One account of the informativity…