🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate July, ok a day late, life has been difficult, here in the Dispossession Zone (I worked from 4 to 8 am today sorting stuff in this house to get rid of, this after coming back to life, solid food, and unsoiled clothing after three days of nasty intestinal affliction, so I am one weary bear — but clean, and looking forward to sushi for lunch), oh have I mentioned the construction workers tossing pieces of junk down from the sky (well, the roof), accidentally cutting off the electricity, and generally lobbing bombs into my daily life?
But enough of street entertainment. Time for a brief note from my correspondence, a query to AMZ the psycho/sociolinguist from someone — call them X — reporting on an odd experience that they had and hoping I could illuminate it, and give the phenomenon it illustrated a name.
The event: a speaker — call them Y — reached a point in their presentation where their audience would expect them to utter an expression E, but instead uttered an entirely different expression E′, which was, however, prosodically similar to E — E′ had, so to speak, the same melody, but not the same words, as E — but, with the exception of my correspondent X, apparently no one in the audience noticed what Y did; they seem to have understood Y to have said E, rather than E′, and so showed no sign of confusion or surprise (while X was astonished).
What happened there, and what was that called?
Now, people write me with all sorts of queries, often asking about something to do with language and its use that I have never reflected on in any detail or studied the literature on, or actually done research on; these queries are genuinely hard for me to grapple with. But every so often someone asks about something that I’m entirely ready to comment on, needing only to get a good reference or two to quote.
My response to X, lightly edited:
You have stumbled on a known phenomenon, predictive language comprehension. (At one point, X’s exposition in fact used the term predictive.) From Wikipedia on “Prediction in language comprehension”:
Linguistic prediction is a phenomenon in psycholinguistics occurring whenever information about a word or other linguistic unit is activated before that unit is actually encountered. … prediction seems to occur regularly when the context of a sentence greatly limits the possible words that have not yet been revealed. For instance, a person listening to a sentence like, “In the summer it is hot, and in the winter it is…” would be highly likely to predict the sentence completion “cold” in advance of actually hearing it.
Prediction in language production is a long-known and much-studied phenomenon; we clearly plan ahead in speaking and writing (there’s nice evidence from speech errors, for one thing, showing that we make errors that anticipate material that is still to come, has not yet been spoken or written). But we anticipate in speech comprehension too, and on occasion our expectations can override whatever is actually produced.
July 3, 2025 at 12:22 pm |
I’m not sure that in your example I would have predicted “cold”, though of course it would not surprise me. I think I would have predicted “not” — rhyme and scansion are so much nicer that way. But perhaps that would be more of a hope than a prediction.
July 3, 2025 at 12:31 pm |
Yeah, that was the Wikipedia example, not mine; I was too lazy to search through my data files to find better examples; life is crowded.