Understanding literacy effects on predictive processing in reading

The ability to anticipate upcoming linguistic information is considered a hallmark of efficient language processing, rooted in the idea that the brain is a prediction engine that uses its knowledge of past experience to predict future events. This has been most widely investigated in the context of lexical prediction, where readers use their knowledge to predict the next word in sentence. For example, when reading a sentence beginning "The cold drink was served with a slice of...", readers might anticipate that "lemon" will be the next word, whereas "cucumber" might be less expected but possible. Substantial evidence shows that skilled readers benefit from predictive processing. This includes findings from eye movements studies showing that readers spend less time looking at more predictable words, and from electroencephalographic (EEG) studies of brain activity showing that more predictable words elicit smaller electrophysiological responses. However, surprisingly little research has examined predictive processing by less skilled readers, although this might shed light on the difficulties they experience.
Accordingly, the aim of the proposed project is to more fully understand the role of literacy skills in supporting linguistic prediction. The project will take an experimental approach to this question, with some elements of the research to be conducted with undergraduate participants (as described below) and other elements conducted using a population of 16-18 years old secondary school students. The latter is an under-research participant group who should have mastered the mechanics of reading but likely to have more diverse literacy skills compared to an undergraduate student population. Work with this population will explore how the research might lead to impact in relation to the teaching of reading.
It is fundamentally important to establish whether literacy skill influences the use of lexical prediction. This would involve using measures of eye measures to compare the speed with which words are recognised in highly-constraining versus less-constraining sentence contexts. To assess effects of literacy skill, we would recruit participants with a broad range of reading ability, which we would assess using standardised tests of vocabulary knowledge and comprehension ability (e.g., the Nelson-Denny reading test) and reading habits. This would allow us to determine whether less skilled readers use lexical prediction less, as well as which factors (vocabulary, comprehension ability, reading habits) predict the effects. Depending on the results, a follow-up experiment might examine whether there is a difference in the prediction cost for skilled versus less skilled readers. This refers to difficulty revising an incorrect prediction; for example when predicting that "lemon" is the next word and finding that "cucumber" is used instead. One possibility is that less skilled readers find it more difficult to revise an incorrect prediction.
Research to date has focused on lexical prediction. However, there is growing interest in other forms of prediction, including syntactic prediction. This is where a reader uses their knowledge and linguistic cues to predict upcoming grammatical structure. Consider as an example a situation in which the word "either" appears within a sentence beginning "The customer decided to order either a pizza...". Here "either" provides a linguistic cue that the sentence has a structure in which one element ("a pizza") is to be contrasted with another. If this knowledge is used predictively, readers might expect the sentence to be continued by an "or"-phrase, such as "or a calzone", that provides a plausible contrast. Research will skilled readers provides evidence for this use of syntactic prediction by showing that less time is spent looking at the "or"-phrase when "either" is used. Therefore, a further research question would be whether less skilled readers also benefit from syntactic prediction.