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Updated: May 10, 2026

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies
Published on: May 9, 2019
Prediction is no panacea: the key to language is in the unexpected
Hugh Rabagliati1, Douglas K Bemis
1Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ, Scotland, United Kingdom. hugh.rabagliati@ed.ac.uk
Abstract:
For action systems, the critical task is to predict what will happen next. In language, however, the critical task is not to predict the next auditory event but to extract meaning. Reducing language to an action system, and putting prediction at center, mistakenly marginalizes our core capacity to communicate the novel and unpredictable.
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