When people read or listen to a conversation, their brains sometimes pro-actively predict which words come next.
Research carried out in 2005 suggested that that these brain predictions are very detailed and can even include the first sound of an upcoming word. However, these findings have never been replicated since the study was published.
Now a team of scientists, including a researcher from the University’s School of Psychology, has demonstrated that the predictive function of the human language system may operate differently than previously thought.
The latest research involved a large-scale brain imaging study, carried out in part at Kent. More than 300 participants read sentences that were presented one word at a time, while electrical brain activity was recorded at the scalp. The findings demonstrated that there is no convincing evidence for the original claim.
Researcher Dr Heather Ferguson, of the School of Psychology, said that it may be that people do predict the sound of upcoming words, but that they do not reliably use either the definite or indefinite article (‘the’ or ‘a’, ‘an’) to change their prediction.
This could be because an unexpected article does not rule out that the expected noun will eventually appear, for instance ‘a’ can precede ‘kite’ if they are separated by another word, like in ‘an old kite’.
However, the research is only relevant for the English language. Other research has shown very different findings in languages such as Spanish, Dutch and French, for which articles correspond to nouns in grammatical gender regardless of intervening words.
The research was led by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.