Francesca Peressotti

The ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of prediction during language comprehension

Language comprehension is at least partially proactive: the cognitive system anticipates pieces of information before they are available in the environment. However, the processes by which we predict upcoming information and the level(s) of representation involved are not entirely understood. In this talk I will present past and ongoing work of our research group in which we investigated how predictions are generated, and what kind of information is predicted.  I will present data with typical and atypical populations supporting the hypothesis that predictive processes are - at least in part - based on processes used for language production and that they likely involve not only the pre-activation of lexical-semantic representations but also the pre-activation of phonological representations.