ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
A hierarchy of linguistic predictions during natural language comprehension.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 166 papers.
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Who cites it
166 citing papers in PubMed.
- Linguistics and human brain: a perspective of computational neuroscience.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2026Review
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- Linguistic information may compensate for age-related decline in attentional filtering.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Visual speech enhances phoneme separability in human superior temporal gyrus.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
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- Functional identification of language-responsive sensors in individual participants in MEG investigations.Journal of neurophysiology · 2026Article
- Preserved topography, lateralization, selectivity, and functional connectivity of the language network in older brains.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Brain-AI convergence: Generative world models and hierarchical attention for human intelligence.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2026Review
- ¿Sabes si viene un code-switch? Bilinguals can predict upcoming code-switches given enough context.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Predictability effects during reading comprehension are not modulated by a visuospatial working memory load.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Infant Cortical Tracking of Speech Shows Emerging Spatial Release from Masking in the First Year of Life.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Compressive learning scaffolds higher-order network structure to enhance human knowledge acquisition.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Competing speech streams are simultaneously represented in the human cortex during attention switching.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- The primate claustrum as a hub for precision weighting of prediction errors across the cortical hierarchy.PLoS biology · 2026Article
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- Constituent-constrained word prediction during language comprehension.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Speech Neurophysiology in Realistic Contexts: Big Hype or Big Leap?The European journal of neuroscience · 2026Review
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- Munich Sentence (MuSe) Database: Completion norms and audio recordings for 619 German sentences.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
106 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Understanding spoken language requires transforming ambiguous acoustic streams into a hierarchy of representations, from phonemes to meaning. It has been suggested that the brain uses prediction to guide the interpretation of incoming input. However, the role of prediction in language processing remains disputed, with disagreement about both the ubiquity and representational nature of predictions. Here, we address both issues by analyzing brain recordings of participants listening to audiobooks, and using a deep neural network (GPT-2) to precisely quantify contextual predictions. First, we establish that brain responses to words are modulated by ubiquitous predictions. Next, we disentangle model-based predictions into distinct dimensions, revealing dissociable neural signatures of predictions about syntactic category (parts of speech), phonemes, and semantics. Finally, we show that high-level (word) predictions inform low-level (phoneme) predictions, supporting hierarchical predictive processing. Together, these results underscore the ubiquity of prediction in language processing, showing that the brain spontaneously predicts upcoming language at multiple levels of abstraction.
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