In well-known demonstrations of lexical prediction during language comprehension, pre-nominal articles that mismatch a likely upcoming noun's gender elicit different neural activity than matching articles. However, theories differ on what this pre-nominal prediction effect means and on what is being predicted. Does it reflect mismatch with a predicted article, or ‘merely’ revision of the noun prediction? We contrasted the ‘article prediction mismatch’ hypothesis and the ‘noun prediction revision’ hypothesis in two ERP experiments on Dutch mini-story comprehension, with pre-registered data collection and analyses. We capitalized on the Dutch gender system, which marks gender on definite articles (‘de/het’) but not on indefinite articles (‘een’). If articles themselves are predicted, mismatching gender should have little effect when readers expected an indefinite article without gender marking. Participants read contexts that strongly suggested either a definite or indefinite noun phrase as its best continuation, followed by a definite noun phrase with the expected noun or an unexpected, different gender noun phrase (‘het boek/de roman’, the book/the novel). Experiment 1 (N = 48) showed a pre-nominal prediction effect, but evidence for the article prediction mismatch hypothesis was inconclusive. Informed by exploratory analyses and power analyses, direct replication Experiment 2 (N = 80) yielded evidence for article prediction mismatch at a newly pre-registered occipital region-of-interest. However, at frontal and posterior channels, unexpectedly definite articles also elicited a gender-mismatch effect, and this support for the noun prediction revision hypothesis was further strengthened by exploratory analyses: ERPs elicited by gender-mismatching articles correlated with incurred constraint towards a new noun (next-word entropy), and N400s for initially unpredictable nouns decreased when articles made them more predictable. By demonstrating its dual nature, our results reconcile two prevalent explanations of the pre-nominal prediction effect.

在语言理解过程中的词汇预测的著名演示中，与可能的即将出现的名词性别不匹配的标称词前文章引起的神经活动与匹配文章不同。但是，关于标称前的预测效果是什么以及正在预测的内容，理论有所不同。它是否反映了与预测文章的不匹配，或者反映了名词预测的“仅仅是”修订？我们通过荷兰语微型故事理解的两个ERP实验，对比了“文章预测不匹配”假说和“名词预测修订”假说，并进行了预先注册的数据收集和分析。我们利用了荷兰的性别系统，该系统在定冠词（'de / het'）上标记性别，而不是在不定冠词（'een'）上标记性别。如果文章本身是可以预测的，当读者期望带有性别标记的不确定文章时，性别不匹配的影响不大。参加者阅读的上下文强烈建议最好使用一个确定的或不确定的名词短语作为其最佳延续，其次是一个带有预期名词的确定名词短语或一个意想不到的性别不同的名词短语（“ het boek / de roman”，这本书/小说）。实验1（N  = 48）显示了标称前的预测效果，但有关该文章预测不匹配假设的证据尚无定论。通过探索性分析和功效分析获知，直接复制实验2（N = 80）为新预测的枕骨感兴趣区域的物品预测不匹配提供了证据。但是，在正面和后方通道，出乎意料的定冠词也引起了性别不匹配的影响，探索性分析进一步加强了对名词预测修订假说的支持：性别不匹配的词所引起的ERP与对新名词的限制有关（下一个词的熵），以及当文章使它们变得更可预测时，最初不可预测的名词的N400减少。通过证明其双重性质，我们的结果调和了对名词前预测效果的两种流行解释。