Listening ahead: Do people form specific expectations about individual speakers?

To communicate successfully, people need to be able to resolve the incredible speed of hearing around 200 spoken syllables per minute. Research suggests that the brain deals with this through prediction. Rather than merely resolving words as they come in, people listen ahead: they form specific expectations about the next word they will hear so that these words can be processed efficiently, and additional processing is only needed if these predictions are incorrect. So far, however, research has mostly assumed that these expectations are general, based simply on statistics of which words, concepts, or structures are most likely. This project tests, for the first time, whether people form expectations in a speaker-specific way, in other words, whether people adapt their predictions to the idiosyncratic words and concepts one person is likely to use, but not another. It relies on established methods to measure
prediction errors in language using electrical brain activity and tests whether these brain responses differ when words are generally unexpected but expected for this particular speaker and whether predictions are adjusted if the listener knows that a speaker is unreliable and makes many speech errors. Moreover, it will test how processing changes when interacting with persons with known language difficulties, for whom expectations are unreliable.

This research will help us understand better what makes humans excellent language users. It will inform educational settings and help us to better frame information to aid learning, and also inform how we can go about communicating with individuals with language disorders.