Unpredictable Endings Do Not Mess With Comprehension

This piece, by Onno Berkan, was published on 12/10/24. The original text, by Terporten et al., was published by the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience on 02/01/24.

This Centre for Research in Neuroscience (Lyon) study investigated how people process and understand sentences while reading, particularly focusing on how context and predictability affect comprehension. The researchers worked with 69 Dutch participants (aged 19-41) who were asked to read sentences on a screen while their brain activity was monitored.

The researchers created sentences with three different levels of predictability:

• High constraint (HC): Very predictable endings

• Medium constraint (MC): Somewhat predictable endings

• Low constraint (LC): Less predictable endings

Participants were split into two groups @4:

• One group saw mostly sentences (80%) that ended as expected (congruent)

• The other group saw mostly sentences (80%) that ended unexpectedly (incongruent)

To ensure participants remained engaged, they had to answer questions about the sentences' content roughly 25% of the time. The study found that participants maintained good comprehension across all conditions, with accuracy rates. This means that, against initial expectations, the study found that the predictive validity (whether sentences generally ended as expected or not) did not significantly affect how people processed the contextual information.

The study challenged some previous research findings that predicted otherwise. The researchers noted that their results might differ from earlier studies because they included a broader range of sentence types with varying levels of predictability.

Moreover, performance remained consistently strong across different conditions, suggesting that readers can adapt to different types of sentence structures and endings.

The study contributes to our understanding of how people process language in real-time, and the results suggest that the relationship between context, prediction, and comprehension may be more complex than previously thought.

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