Incrementality and Prediction in Human Sentence Processing

By Gerry T. M. Altmann, Jelena Mirkovic. Cognitive Sciences, 2009

374 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We identify a number of principles with respect to prediction that, we argue, underpin adult language comprehension: (a) comprehension consists in realizing a mapping between the unfolding sentence and the event representation corresponding to the real-world event being described; (b) the realization of this mapping manifests as the ability to predict both how the language will unfold, and how the real-world event would unfold if it were being experienced directly; (c) concurrent linguistic and nonlinguistic inputs, and the prior internal states of the system, each drive the predictive process; (d) the representation of prior internal states across a representational substrate common to the linguistic and nonlinguistic domains enables the predictive process to operate over variable time frames and variable levels of representational abstraction. We review empirical data exemplifying the operation of these principles and discuss the relationship between prediction, event structure, thematic role assignment, and incrementality.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f6d93c55b83deb3b682bd2a19ad5597b575e346

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Citations in the corpus

Spoken language-mediated anticipatory eye- movements are modulated by reading ability - Evidence from Indian low and high literates (2012, background): “…has been well established and consequently (and unsurprisingly) theoretical accounts of predictive language processing have become very influential (e.g., Altmann & Mirkovic, 2009; Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006; Federmeier, 2007; Kukona, Fang, Aicher, Chen, & Magnuson, 2011; Pickering & Garrod, 2007).”
Consequences of the Now-or-Never bottleneck for signed versus spoken languages (2015, background): “If language processing involves prediction – to make the encoding of new linguistic material sufficiently rapid – then a critical aspect of language acquisition is learning to make such predictions successfully (Altmann & Mirkovic 2009).”