Effects of goals and strategies on predictive processing: a visual world eye-tracking study on honorific agreement in Korean

Abstract There is ongoing debate about whether prediction is driven solely by bottom-up associative links or is modulated by top-down goals and strategies. The current study attempts to address this issue by investigating the role of top-down factors in Korean speakers’ predictive processing of honorific agreement. Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments were conducted, analyzing participants’ anticipatory eye movements while manipulating two top-down factors. In Experiment 1, we assigned participants to two groups with different instructions, asking one group to listen to sentences and answer referent-selection questions, and the other group to actively predict the upcoming referent. Experiment 2 manipulated the validity of predictive cues by interspersing experimental items with fillers containing consistent or inconsistent continuations. Results from Experiment 1 showed that participants instructed to actively anticipate the referent used honorific information more quickly to make predictions than the comprehension-only group. In Experiment 2, the group exposed to predictive linguistic stimuli showed an earlier and stronger prediction effect compared to the group exposed to stimuli with no prediction validity. These results suggest that comprehenders engage in different degrees of prediction according to the current demands of task goals and strategies. We discuss these findings in light of recent theories of predictive language processing.