Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Do language users predict word forms as readily as they predict semantic features? Previous studies are conflicting, possibly because they did not differentiate between two types of word form relationship: Head and rhyme relationships, sharing onset or offset features with predictable words. Here, we investigated prediction of form and meaning by means of a priming lexical decision task. People read constraining sentences that disconfirmed their expectations, and indicated, at sentence offset, whether a letter string was a word. Targets were predictable but not presented nouns, semantically related nouns, as well as head- and rhyme-related nouns. Unrelated control nouns were also presented. Results showed facilitation for predictable and semantically related words, with no difference between the two. While no effects emerged for rhymes, head-related words showed slowing, indicating suppression of lexical neighbors following prediction of word forms. Our findings align with word recognition models and prediction-by-production models of predictive processing.