Nieuwland, Mante S, Politzer-Ahles, Stephen, Heyselaar, Evelien et al. (20 more authors) (2018) Large-scale replication study reveals a limit on probabilistic prediction in language comprehension. eLife. ISSN 2050-084X
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.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2018, Nieuwland et al. |
Keywords: | Journal Article |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Sciences (York) > Psychology (York) |
Depositing User: | Pure (York) |
Date Deposited: | 30 Apr 2018 13:00 |
Last Modified: | 25 Dec 2024 00:18 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.33468 |
Status: | Published |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.7554/eLife.33468 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:130281 |