Love thy neighbor: Facilitation and inhibition in the competition between parallel predictions

Ample evidence suggests that during word recognition and production, simultaneously activated lexical and sublexical representations interact, demonstrating varied patterns of facilitation and inhibition in various tasks and measures. A separate line of research has led to a growing consensus that prediction during sentence processing involves activating multiple possible predictions. However, very little is known about the nature of the interactions between parallel predictions. The current study employed a speeded cloze task to probe competition between simultaneously activated predictions. We focused on the modal response (the most probable completion for a sentence) and its strongest competitor (the second most probable completion). Examining production latencies of the modal response, the results showed an interaction between competitor strength and the semantic relatedness between the competitor and the modal: when the two were related, the stronger the competitor was, the more it facilitated production; however, when the two were unrelated, the stronger the competitor was, the more inhibition it caused. These results contrast with the pattern observed for the influences of near and distant semantic neighbors on word recognition and production. However, we show that when the different nature of the tasks is taken into consideration, these patterns of interaction between parallel predictions can be accounted for by the interactive activation and competition (IAC) model used to account for previous neighborhood effects (Chen & Mirman, 2012).