Numerous studies report brain potential evidence for the anticipation of specific words during language comprehension. In the most convincing demonstrations, highly predictable nouns exert an influence on processing even before they appear to a reader or listener, as indicated by the brain's neural response to a prenominal adjective or article when it mismatches the expectations about the upcoming noun. However, recent studies suggest that some well-known demonstrations of prediction may be hard to replicate. This could signal the use of data-contingent analysis, but might also mean that readers and listeners do not always use prediction-relevant information in the way that psycholinguistic theories typically suggest. To shed light on this issue, we performed a close replication of one of the best-cited ERP studies on word anticipation (Van Berkum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman & Hagoort, 2005; Experiment 1), in which participants listened to Dutch spoken mini-stories. In the original study, the marking of grammatical gender on pre-nominal adjectives (‘groot/grote’) elicited an early positivity when mismatching the gender of an unheard, highly predictable noun, compared to matching gender. The current pre-registered study involved that same manipulation, but used a novel set of materials twice the size of the original set, an increased sample size (N = 187), and Bayesian mixed-effects model analyses that better accounted for known sources of variance than the original. In our study, mismatching gender elicited more negative voltage than matching gender at posterior electrodes. However, this N400-like effect was small in size and lacked support from Bayes Factors. In contrast, we successfully replicated the original's noun effects. While our results yielded some support for prediction, they do not support the Van Berkum et al. effect and highlight the risks associated with commonly employed data-contingent analyses and small sample sizes. Our results also raise the question whether Dutch listeners reliably or consistently use adjectival inflection information to inform their noun predictions.

许多研究报告了大脑在语言理解过程中预测特定单词的潜在证据。在最令人信服的演示中，高度可预测的名词甚至在出现在读者或听众面前之前就对处理产生了影响，正如大脑对名词前形容词或冠词与对即将出现的名词的期望不匹配时的神经反应所表明的那样。然而，最近的研究表明，一些众所周知的预测演示可能难以复制。这可能标志着数据相关分析的使用，但也可能意味着读者和听众并不总是按照心理语言学理论通常建议的方式使用与预测相关的信息。为了阐明这个问题，我们对一项关于单词预期的引用最多的 ERP 研究（Van Berkum、Brown、Zwitserlood、Kooijman 和 Hagoort，2005；实验 1）进行了精密复制，其中参与者聆听了荷兰语迷你口语-故事。在最初的研究中，与匹配性别相比，当未听说过的、高度可预测的名词的性别不匹配时，在名词前形容词（“groot/grote”）上标记语法性别会引发早期积极性。当前的预注册研究涉及相同的操作，但使用了一组两倍于原始材料的新颖材料，增加了样本量（N = 187），并且贝叶斯混合效应模型分析更好地解释了已知的来源与原来相比的差异。在我们的研究中，性别不匹配在后电极处比性别匹配引起更多的负电压。然而，这种类似 N400 的效应规模较小，并且缺乏贝叶斯因子的支持。相比之下，我们成功地复制了原作的名词效果。虽然我们的结果为预测提供了一些支持，但它们并不支持 Van Berkum 等人的预测。效果并强调与常用的数据相关分析和小样本量相关的风险。我们的结果还提出了一个问题：荷兰听众是否可靠或一致地使用形容词屈折信息来告知他们的名词预测。