What do we mean by prediction in language comprehension?

By Gina R. Kuperberg, Florian Jaeger. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 2015

955 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT We consider several key aspects of prediction in language comprehension: its computational nature, the representational level(s) at which we predict, whether we use higher-level representations to predictively pre-activate lower level representations, and whether we “commit” in any way to our predictions, beyond pre-activation. We argue that the bulk of behavioural and neural evidence suggests that we predict probabilistically and at multiple levels and grains of representation. We also argue that we can, in principle, use higher-level inferences to predictively pre-activate information at multiple lower representational levels. We suggest that the degree and level of predictive pre-activation might be a function of its expected utility, which, in turn, may depend on comprehenders’ goals and their estimates of the relative reliability of their prior knowledge and the bottom-up input. Finally, we argue that all these properties of language understanding can be naturally explained and productively explored within a multi-representational hierarchical actively generative architecture whose goal is to infer the message intended by the producer, and in which predictions play a crucial role in explaining the bottom-up input.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/70976743aaec1be2b90afe84330efbcb03130b7b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

  1. Martin J. Pickering

In Cognitive Neuroscience

  1. Martin Corley
  2. Martin J. Pickering
  3. Aine Ito
  4. Simon Garrod
  5. Robert J. Hartsuiker
  6. Holly P. Branigan
  7. S. Bernolet
  8. Victor S. Ferreira

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

  1. Martin Corley
  2. Martin J. Pickering
  3. Aine Ito
  4. Robert J. Hartsuiker
  5. Holly P. Branigan
  6. S. Bernolet
  7. Timothy Desmet

Citations in the corpus