The Department of Linguistics is pleased to present:

Anthony Yacovone
Tufts University / Massachusetts General Hospital

speaking on

Prediction is a piece of ceke: Developmental and psycholinguistic evidence for prediction of word-forms during natural language comprehension.

Abstract

For decades, psycholinguists have fiercely debated the role and centrality of prediction in human language. These debates center on whether people routinely predict specific lexical items and their word-forms during comprehension. To date, form-based prediction has been poorly replicated and only seems to emerge in the most constraining of experiments. These findings are often taken as evidence that form-based prediction is likely to be an artifact of how we study language in the lab, and thus, it is unlikely to play a central role in natural language processing.

In this talk, I will present three studies that use electroencephalography (EEG) to assess form-based prediction during naturalistic comprehension. Study 1 asks whether English-speaking adults predict the phonological form of upcoming words while listening to a children’s story. In Studies 2 and 3, I ask how prediction of this kind develops. I will end my talk by outlining my plans for future research and briefly discussing how this work might inform research efforts in linguistics more broadly.

Join us in person for this special talk on Tuesday, February 13th at 11:40 am!