Got it right up front? Further evidence for parallel graded prediction during prenominal article processing in a self-paced reading study

Recent studies suggest that language users generate and maintain multiple predictions in parallel, especially in tasks that explicitly instruct participants to generate predictions. Here, we investigated the possibility of parallel gradedness of linguistic predictions in a simple reading task, using a new measure—imbalance—that captures the probabilistic difference between multiple sentence completions. We focus on prenominal gender-marked articles in German to obtain prediction-specific effects. Native speakers of German read predictable or unpredictable gender-marked nouns that were preceded by prediction-consistent or -inconsistent prenominal articles. Sentence frames either biased expectations more strongly toward the most likely continuation of the sentence, or balanced expectations between the first and second most likely continuation. The results showed reading facilitation for gender-marked articles when sentences were more biased but slowing when sentences were more balanced, irrespective of article predictability. We conclude that readers issue multiple prenominal predictions and weigh them according to their likelihood, providing evidence for parallel gradedness of prenominal predictions. The results are discussed in light of theoretical models on prediction and rational sentence processing.