title: Probabilistic word pre-activation during language comprehension inferred from electrical brain activity.
abstract: Despite the numerous examples of anticipatory cognitive processes at micro and macro levels in many animal species, the idea that anticipation of specific words plays an integral role in real-time language processing has been contentious. Here we exploited a phonological regularity of English indefinite articles ('an' precedes nouns beginning with vowel sounds, whereas 'a' precedes nouns beginning with consonant sounds) in combination with event-related brain potential recordings from the human scalp to show that readers' brains can pre-activate individual words in a graded fashion to a degree that can be estimated from the probability that each word is given as a continuation for a sentence fragment offline. These findings are evidence that readers use the words in a sentence (as cues to their world knowledge) to estimate relative likelihoods for upcoming words.
authors: Department of Cognitive Science, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA. kadelong@cogsci.ucsd.edu
authors: Katherine A
authors: KA
authors: DeLong
authors: Thomas P
authors: TP
authors: Urbach
authors: Marta
authors: M
authors: Kutas
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D004594:Electrophysiology; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D016013:Likelihood Functions; D008297:Male; D011336:Probability; D011932:Reading; D012535:Scalp