The DOI matches its Crossref record; 19 of the 19 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Is prediction necessary to understand language? Probably not
Open accessAbstract
Some recent theoretical accounts in the cognitive sciences suggest that prediction is necessary to understand language. Here we evaluate this proposal. We consider arguments that prediction provides a unified theoretical principle of the human mind and that it pervades cortical function. We discuss whether evidence of human abilities to detect statistical regularities is necessarily evidence for predictive processing and evaluate suggestions that prediction is necessary for language learning. We point out that not all language users appear to predict language and that suboptimal input makes prediction often very challenging. Prediction, moreover, is strongly context-dependent and impeded by resource limitations. We also argue that it may be problematic that most experimental evidence for predictive language processing comes from “prediction-encouraging” experimental set-ups. We conclude that languages can be learned and understood in the absence of prediction. Claims that all language processing is predictive in nature are premature.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?
Friston, K. (2010) · Nature Reviews Neuroscience · doi:10.1038/nrn2787 · Cited by 8,120 · cited 1×
“Many researchers explicitly or implicitly appear to support the notion that prediction is necessary to understand language (in line with recent proposals that prediction is a or the fundamental principle of human information processing, e.g. Clark, 2013; Friston, 2010).”
BackgroundWhatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science
Clark, A. (2013) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x12000477 · Cited by 5,924 · cited 4×
“Prediction provides a unified theoretical framework for the cognitive sciences Theorists such as Andy Clark (2013) have proposed that “brains… are essentially prediction machines”.”
BackgroundInfluentialBeta-band oscillations—Signalling the status quo?
Engel, A. K., & Fries, P. (2010) · Current Opinion in Neurobiology · doi:10.1016/j.conb.2010.02.015 · Cited by 2,953
Canonical Microcircuits for Predictive Coding
Bastos, A. M., Usrey, W. M., Adams, R. A., Mangun, G. R., Fries, P., & Friston, K. J. (2012) · Neuron · doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2012.10.038 · Cited by 2,421 · cited 1×
“Alpha and beta oscillations are thought to index top-down processing whereas gamma oscillations are presumed to index bottom-up processing (Bastos et al., 2012; Wang, 2010).”
BackgroundNeurophysiological and Computational Principles of Cortical Rhythms in Cognition
Wang, X.-J. (2010) · Physiological Reviews · doi:10.1152/physrev.00035.2008 · Cited by 1,939
Syntactic persistence in language production
Bock, J. K. (1986) · Cognitive Psychology · doi:10.1016/0010-0285(86)90004-6 · Cited by 1,911
An integrated theory of language production and comprehension
Pickering, M. J., & Garrod, S. (2013) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x12001495 · Cited by 1,569
On Broca, brain, and binding: A new framework
Hagoort, P. (2005) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.tics.2005.07.004 · Cited by 1,411
Integration of word meaning and world knowledge in language comprehension
Hagoort, P., Hald, L., Bastiaansen, M., & Petersson, K. M. (2004) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1095455 · Cited by 1,396
Distributed representations, simple recurrent networks, and grammatical structure
Elman, J. L. (1991) · Machine Learning · doi:10.1007/bf00114844 · Cited by 1,354
Cited by
What do we mean by prediction in language comprehension?
Kuperberg, G. R., & Jaeger, T. F. (2016) · Language, Cognition and Neuroscience · doi:10.1080/23273798.2015.1102299 · Cited by 1,087
Predicting while comprehending language: A theory and review.
Pickering, M. J., & Gambi, C. (2018) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037/bul0000158 · Cited by 518
Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science
Blasi, D. E., Henrich, J., Adamou, E., Kemmerer, D., & Majid, A. (2022) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.tics.2022.09.015 · Cited by 396
A hierarchy of linguistic predictions during natural language comprehension
Heilbron, M., Armeni, K., Schoffelen, J.-M., Hagoort, P., & de Lange, F. P. (2022) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2201968119 · Cited by 343
fMRI reveals language-specific predictive coding during naturalistic sentence comprehension
Shain, C., Blank, I. A., van Schijndel, M., Schuler, W., & Fedorenko, E. (2020) · Neuropsychologia · doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2019.107307 · Cited by 215
Metadata
- Authors
- Huettig, F., & Mani, N.
- Venue
- Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2015-09-07
- Volume
- 31
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 19-31
- ISSN
- 2327-3798 (ISSN-L)
- 2327-3801
- OpenAlex
- W1146351399
- Cited by
- 252
- References
- 19
- FWCI
- 7.74
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Is prediction necessary to understand language? Probably not. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1080/23273798.2015.1072223
- The paper
- Huettig, F., & Mani, N. (2016). Is prediction necessary to understand language? Probably not. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2015.1072223
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
