The University of Georgia Department of Linguistics hosted Dr. Masaya Yoshida, Associate Professor of Linguistics at Northwestern University, for a guest lecture on February 28, 2020. The title of the presentation was "Syntactic Prediction in Online Sentence processing."
Recent studies in language science have compiled evidence suggesting that language processing is "predictive," i.e., that the language processing mechanism use existing knowledge and expectations to make hypotheses about yet-to-be-seen information. Although researchers largely agree that language processing is predictive, the mechanisms driving such predictions remain unclear. It is also not entirely obvious what is meant by the term "prediction." Given these considerations, the goal would be to address the following questions. What do researchers mean by “prediction in language processing”? What is predicted during online language processing? What drives prediction? How can we measure prediction? Paying special attentions to online syntactic structure building, I will try to answer these questions. To this end, I will discuss two recent studies on syntactic prediction in English and Japanese, to approach these questions.