Prediction in the maze: Evidence for probabilistic pre-activation from the English a/an contrast

The idea that comprehenders predict upcoming linguistic content has become core to many theories of language processing. Experimental studies exploiting morphosyntactic and phonotactic constraints on a word form preceding high cloze target have been key underpinning predictive accounts comprehension, but investigating these tight sequential contrasts with traditional behavioral methods is difficult. maze task, its more focal measure incremental processing, may provide cheap easy methodology study early cues prediction. An experiment the a/an contrast (DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, 2005; Nieuwland, et al., 2018) using A-maze (Boyce, Futrell, Levy, 2020) finds unexpected articles, as well nouns, elicit slower response times. Response times are also shown be inversely related noun probabilities, responders showing larger effects expectation. This demonstrates task can sensitive expectation useful alternative for prediction in comprehension.