Lecture | LACG Meetings
Lexical prediction during discourse comprehension: ERP evidence from Dutch gender-marking
- Date
- Thursday 15 October 2020
- Time
- Series
- LACG Meetings
- Location
- Online via Microsoft Teams (see link below)
Abstract
People are known to sometimes predict upcoming words. Strong evidence for such lexical predictions comes from ‘pre-nominal prediction effects’: pre-nominal adjectives or articles elicit enhanced ERP activity when they mismatch the gender of a likely upcoming noun compared to when they match (e.g., DeLong et al., 2005; Van Berkum et al., 2005). However, both the replicability and functional significance of the available effects remains disputed.
In my talk, I will present recent evidence from my lab that addresses these issues. First, I will present the results of a large-scale ERP project that attempted to replicate a well-known Dutch study that reported prediction-related effects on pre-nominal adjectival suffixes (e.g., “een grote boekenkast”, Van Berkum et al., 2005). Then, I will present results from a study on prediction-related effects on Dutch pre-nominal articles (‘de/het’) and the role of article gender and definiteness. The results of this study reconcile two prevalent explanations of the pre-nominal prediction effect.