Definitely saw it coming? An ERP study on the role of article gender and definiteness in predictive processing

Abstract

People sometimes anticipate specific words during language comprehension. Consistent with word anticipation, pre-nominal articles elicit differential neural activity when they mismatch the gender of a predictable noun compared with when they match. However, the functional significance of this pre-nominal effect is unclear: Do people only predict the noun or do they predict the entire article-noun combination? We addressed this question in an event-related potential study (N=48) with pre-registered data acquisition and analyses, capitalizing on gender-marking on Dutch definite articles and the lack thereof on indefinite articles. Participants read mini-story contexts that strongly suggested either a definite or indefinite noun phrase (e.g., het/een boek, the/a book) as its best continuation, followed by a definite noun phrase with the expected noun or an unexpected, different gender noun ( het boek/de roman, the book/the novel). We observed an enhanced negativity (N400) for articles that were unexpectedly definite or mismatched the expected gender, with the former effect being strongest. Pre-registered analyses and exploratory Bayesian analyses did not yield convincing evidence that the effect of gender-mismatch depended on expected definiteness. While prediction of article form cannot be excluded, it may not be required to elicit pre-nominal effects.