Prediction in the maze: Evidence for probabilistic pre-activation from the English a/an contrast

Abstract

The idea that comprehenders predict upcoming linguistic content has become core to many theories of language processing. Experimental studies exploiting morphosyntactic and phonotactic constraints on a word form preceding a high cloze target word have been key to underpinning predictive accounts of comprehension, but investigating these tight sequential contrasts with traditional behavioral methods is difficult. The maze task, with its more focal measure of incremental processing, may provide a cheap and easy methodology to study early cues to prediction. An experiment investigating the a/an contrast (DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, 2005; Nieuwland, et al., 2018) using A-maze (Boyce, Futrell, & Levy, 2020) finds that unexpected articles, as well as nouns, elicit slower focal response times. Response times are also shown to be inversely related to noun cloze probabilities, with slower responders showing larger effects of expectation. This study demonstrates that the maze task can be sensitive to expectation and is a useful alternative methodology for investigating prediction in comprehension.