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

Nieuwland, M. S. et al. (2018) Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension. eLife, 7, e33468. (doi: 10.7554/eLife.33468.001)

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.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Barr, Dr Dale and Rousselet, Dr Guillaume

Creator Roles

Barr, D. J.: Software, Formal analysis, Writing – review and editing
Rousselet, G. A.: Resources, Formal analysis, Supervision, Methodology, Writing – review and editing

• Authors: Nieuwland, M. S., Politzer-Ahles, S., Heyselaar, E., Segaert, K., Darley, E., Kazanina, N., Von Grebmer Zu Wolfsthurn, S., Bartolozzi, F., Kogan, V., Ito, A., Mézière, D., Barr, D. J., Rousselet, G. A., Ferguson, H., Busch-Moreno, S., Fu, X., Tuomainen Eugenia Kulakova, J., Husband, E. M., Donaldson, D. I., Kohút, Z., Rueschemeyer, S.-A., and Huettig, F.
• College/School: College of Medical Veterinary and Life Sciences > School of Psychology & Neuroscience
• Journal Name: eLife
• Publisher: eLife Sciences Publications
• ISSN: 2050-084X
• ISSN (Online): 2050-084X
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2018 Nieuwland et al.
• First Published: First published in eLife 7:e33468
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License