Integration and Prediction in Language Processing: A Synthesis of Old and New

Current theories of language processing emphasize prediction as a mechanism to facilitate comprehension, which contrasts with the state of the field a few decades ago, when prediction was rarely mentioned. We argue that the field of psycholinguistics would benefit from revisiting these earlier theories of comprehension that attempted to explain integration and the processes underlying the formation of rich representations of linguistic input and that emphasized informational newness over redundancy. We suggest further that integration and anticipation may be complementary mechanisms that operate on elaborated, coherent discourse representations, supporting enhanced comprehension and memory. In addition, the traditional emphasis on language as a tool for communication implies that much linguistic content will be nonredundant; moreover, the purpose of anticipation is probably not to permit the prediction of exact lexical or syntactic forms but instead to induce a state of preparedness that allows the comprehender to be receptive to new information, thus facilitating its processing.