Schedule of Events | Symposia

Chunking Constrains Prediction during Language Comprehension

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Jiajie Zou^1,2 (jiajiezou@zju.edu.cn), Nai Ding¹; ¹Zhejiang University, ²Ernst Strüngmann Institute, Frankfurt, Germany

Speech is a highly rapid sequence with complicated internal structures. Prediction and chunking are two possible mechanisms for the brain to efficiently process speech and they are often viewed as separate or even opposing mechanisms. Here, we investigate whether the two mechanisms interact and hypothesize that the chunk structure in speech modulates how the brain predicts basic linguistic items, i.e., morphemes. In three magnetoencephalography (MEG) experiments in Mandarin Chinese, we characterize neural prediction of morphemes using the neural response to morpheme surprisal and analyze how this response is modulated by chunks, i.e., major linguistic constituents. We demonstrate that the MEG surprisal response is significantly stronger for morphemes belonging to the ongoing chunk than morphemes across a chunk boundary. This chunk-boundary effect on morpheme prediction is further modulated by the certainty of a chunk boundary. The conclusions are also confirmed by analyzing open dataset of MEG responses to English narratives. In summary, these results strongly suggest that the brain employs a chunk-based prediction strategy and more precisely predicts items within a chunk.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Syntax