title: Pre-processing in sentence comprehension: Sensitivity to likely upcoming meaning and structure.
abstract: For more than a decade, views of sentence comprehension have been shifting toward wider acceptance of a role for linguistic pre-processing-that is, anticipation, expectancy, (neural) pre-activation, or prediction-of upcoming semantic content and syntactic structure. In this survey, we begin by examining the implications of each of these "brands" of predictive comprehension, including the issue of potential costs and consequences to not encountering highly constrained sentence input. We then describe a number of studies (many using online methodologies) that provide results consistent with prospective sensitivity to various grains and levels of semantic and syntactic information, acknowledging that such pre-processing is likely to occur in other linguistic and extralinguistic domains, as well. This review of anticipatory findings also includes some discussion on the relationship of priming to prediction. We conclude with a brief examination of some possible limits to prediction, and with a suggestion for future work to probe whether and how various strands of prediction may integrate during real-time comprehension.
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA (UCSD).
authors.forename: Katherine A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: DeLong
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA (UCSD).
authors.forename: Melissa
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Troyer
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA (UCSD); Center for Research in Language, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA (UCSD); Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA (UCSD); Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA (UCSD).
authors.forename: Marta
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kutas