TY - JOUR
T1 - Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension
AU - Nieuwland, Mante S.
AU - Politzer-Ahles, Stephen
AU - Heyselaar, Evelien
AU - Segaert, Katrien
AU - Darley, Emily
AU - Kazanina, Nina
AU - Von Grebmer Zu Wolfsthurn, Sarah
AU - Bartolozzi, Federica
AU - Kogan, Vita
AU - Ito, Aine
AU - Mézière, Diane
AU - Barr, Dale J.
AU - Rousselet, Guillaume A.
AU - Ferguson, Heather J.
AU - Busch-Moreno, Simon
AU - Fu, Xiao
AU - Tuomainen, Jyrki
AU - Kulakova, Eugenia
AU - Husband, E. Matthew
AU - Donaldson, David I.
AU - Kohút, Zdenko
AU - Rueschemeyer, Shirley Ann
AU - Huettig, Falk
PY - 2018/4/3
Y1 - 2018/4/3
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85049020933&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.7554/eLife.33468
DO - 10.7554/eLife.33468
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 29631695
AN - SCOPUS:85049020933
SN - 2050-084X
VL - 7
JO - eLife
JF - eLife
M1 - e33468
ER -