ESRC DTP Interdisciplinary Studentship: The Role of Prediction in Reading

Project description: Making predictions about future events challenges us to extract structure from streams of sensory
signals that are often initially incomprehensible. Learning to extract meaningful structure allows us to interpret incoming
signals rapidly, and critically to predict upcoming events. Mastering this skill is critical for interacting in dynamic
environments and developing complex cognitive functions such as learning language or music. Reading is a form of
visual pattern recognition. Reading comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading. For reading comprehension, proficient
readers rely on the associations between words occurring in verbal context to assign an interpretation. Reading is a
process influenced by predictions made about words: their meaning, form and syntactic properties. Visual prediction may
thus play an important role in reading comprehension, but the topic remains a relatively new domain of research. This
PhD project aims to fill the gap by examining the strength of prediction in the reading comprehension of monolingual and
bilingual children and adults. The role of prediction may be substantially different in participants that rely on a unique
language system and participants that use two languages (and thus have two different sets of predictions).