People sometimes predict upcoming words during language comprehension, but debate remains on when and to what extent such predictions indeed occur. The rational adaptation hypothesis holds that predictions develop with expected utility: people predict more strongly when predictions are frequently confirmed (low prediction error) rather than disconfirmed. However, supporting evidence is mixed thus far and has only involved measuring responses to supposedly predicted nouns, not to preceding articles that may also be predicted. The current, large-sample (N = 200) ERP study on written discourse comprehension in Dutch therefore employs the well-known ‘pre-nominal prediction effect’: enhanced N400-like ERPs for articles that are unexpected given a likely upcoming noun’s gender (i.e., the neuter gender article ‘het’ when people expect the common gender noun phrase ‘de krant’, the newspaper) compared to expected articles. We investigated whether the pre-nominal prediction effect is larger when most of the presented stories contain predictable article-noun combinations (75% predictable, 25% unpredictable) compared to when most stories contain unpredictable combinations (25% predictable, 75% unpredictable). Our results show the pre-nominal prediction effect in both contexts, with little evidence to suggest that this effect depended on the percentage of predictable combinations. Moreover, the little evidence suggesting such a dependence was primarily observed for unexpected, neuter-gender articles (‘het’), which is inconsistent with the rational adaptation hypothesis. In line with recent demonstrations (Nieuwland, 2021a,b), our results suggest that linguistic prediction is less ‘rational’ or Bayes optimal than is often suggested.

人们有时会在语言理解过程中预测即将到来的单词，但关于这种预测何时以及在多大程度上确实发生的争论仍然存在。理性适应假说认为预测随着预期效用而发展：当预测经常被证实（低预测误差）而不是被否定时，人们的预测会更强烈。然而，到目前为止，支持证据是混杂的，并且只涉及测量对假定预测的名词的反应，而不是对也可能被预测的先前文章的反应。因此，当前关于荷兰语书面语篇理解的大样本 (N = 200) ERP 研究采用了众所周知的“名词前预测效应”：针对可能即将出现的名词性别的文章，增强了类似 N400 的 ERP（ IE，报纸）与预期文章相比。我们研究了与大多数故事包含不可预测的组合（25% 可预测，75% 不可预测）相比，当大多数呈现的故事包含可预测的冠词-名词组合（75% 可预测，25% 不可预测）时，预名词预测效果是否更大。我们的结果显示了两种情况下的预命名预测效果，几乎没有证据表明这种效果取决于可预测组合的百分比。此外，几乎没有证据表明这种依赖性主要是针对意想不到的中性文章（“het”）观察到的，这与理性适应假设不一致。与最近的示威活动一致 ( Nieuwland, 2021a,b)，我们的结果表明，语言预测不如通常建议的那样“理性”或贝叶斯最优。