Prediction in language comprehension beyond specific words: An ERP study on sentence comprehension in Polish Jakub M. Szewczyk a,⇑ , Herbert Schriefers b a Jagiellonian University, Institute of Psychology, Kraków, Poland b Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, The Netherlands article info Article history: Received 5 March 2012 revision received 19 December 2012 Keywords: Prediction Gender agreement Event-related potentials N400 abstract Recently, several ERP studies have shown that the human language comprehension system anticipates words that are highly likely continuations of a given text. However, it remains an open issue whether the language comprehension system can also make predictions that go beyond a specific word. Here, we address the question of whether readers predict broad semantically defined classes of words. Event-related brain potentials were recorded, while native Polish speakers read short stories for comprehension. The stories were setting up a context that was very strongly biasing towards either an animate or an inanimate direct object noun in the story-final sentence. At the same time, the context was highly predictive for a specific direct object noun or not predictive for a specific direct object noun. The noun that was actually presented either did fit the animacy bias of the context or did not fit. The noun was preceded by an adjective. Polish has four classes of grammatical gender in the singular: feminine, neuter, masculine-animate, and masculine-inanimate. The prenominal adjective agrees with the direct object noun with respect to case and, in the case of mas- culine-animate and masculine-inanimate nouns, with respect to the in-/animacy of the noun. This allowed us to probe, at the adjective, whether the comprehension system pre- dicts the in-/animacy of the direct object noun. Prediction-inconsistent adjectives elicited a negativity relative to prediction-consistent adjectives. This negativity was of the same size for contexts biasing towards a specific noun and for contexts not biasing towards a specific noun. These findings show that the comprehension system can predict semantically defined classes of words. Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction Until recently, the idea that the human language comprehension system anticipates highly probable continuations of unfolding sentences has not been very popular (see Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman, & Hagoort, 2005, for discussion). As Van Berkum et al. (2005, p. 444) put it: ‘‘Whereas the concept of low-level intralexical priming is ubiquitously accepted as central to understanding human language comprehension, the con- cept of prediction has instead predominantly acquired a far less favorable association, one with undesirable strate- gic processing afforded by ill-designed stimuli.’’ Rather, sentence comprehension was conceived of as a process of perceiving a sequence of words and of building a syntactic and semantic structure on the basis of this information. The language comprehension system considered in this way is a passive one, waiting for new words that are integrated into the structure that has already been built (e.g. Forster, 1981; Seidenberg, Tanenhaus, Leiman, & Bienkowski, 1982; Zwitserlood, 1989). Many reports since then indicate that this passive view of the language comprehension system may not be fully 0749-596X/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.12.002 ⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Instytut Psychologii, Al. Mickiewicza 3, 31-120 Kraków, Poland. Fax: +48 126237699. E-mail address: jakub.szewczyk@uj.edu.pl (J.M. Szewczyk). Journal of Memory and Language 68 (2013) 297–314 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of Memory and Language journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jml