Thinking ahead: The role and roots of prediction in language comprehension

Reviewed are studies using event‐related potentials to examine when and how sentence context information is used during language comprehension. Results suggest that, when it can, the brain uses context to predict features of likely upcoming items. However, although prediction seems important for com...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychophysiology 2007-07, Vol.44 (4), p.491-505
Main Author: Federmeier, Kara D.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Aging
Aging - physiology
Brain - physiology
Comprehension - physiology
Electroencephalography
Event-related potentials
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Functional Laterality - physiology
Hemispheric differences
Humans
Language
N400
Sentence processing
Thinking - physiology
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Summary:Reviewed are studies using event‐related potentials to examine when and how sentence context information is used during language comprehension. Results suggest that, when it can, the brain uses context to predict features of likely upcoming items. However, although prediction seems important for comprehension, it also appears susceptible to age‐related deterioration and can be associated with processing costs. The brain may address this trade‐off by employing multiple processing strategies, distributed across the two cerebral hemispheres. In particular, left hemisphere language processing seems to be oriented toward prediction and the use of top‐down cues, whereas right hemisphere comprehension is more bottom‐up, biased toward the veridical maintenance of information. Such asymmetries may arise, in turn, because language comprehension mechanisms are integrated with language production mechanisms only in the left hemisphere (the PARLO framework).
ISSN:0048-5772
1540-5958
1469-8986
DOI:10.1111/j.1469-8986.2007.00531.x