Management of mispredictions in English language users from a varied language community

Prediction is known to play a role in language processing for monolingual as well as bilingual language users. Less understood is what happens when language users encounter mispredictions. While previous studies have shown that mispredictions result in reduced efficiency in language processing, it is unclear whether this is caused by abandoning the prediction and adopting the actual input, or by attempts to reconcile the prediction with the input. The present study investigated how language users from a varied language community manage misprediction in written and spoken English caused by incongruency between verb re-mention bias and pronominal reference. We predicted more pronoun repetition errors in incongruent contexts (Lisa annoys Peter because he...) compared to congruent contexts (Lisa annoys Peter because she...). We further asked whether language experience, operationalized as age of English acquisition and early bilingualism, modulates the management of mispredictions in this context. In three experiments, we used a novel adaptation of a sentence repetition paradigm focused on pronoun recall. English language users were presented with spoken or written sentence prompts, repeated them from memory, and produced continuations. We found that pronouns in congruent sentence prompts were repeated more accurately in both speech and writing compared to in incongruent ones, regardless of age of English acquisition and early bilingualism. These results reveal that re-mention biases affect how information is encoded and recalled. We argue that the results further suggest the occurrence of mispredictions on the discourse-level in English text and speech, which may have upstream consequences. Furthermore, these mispredictions are managed similarly in English by language users from vastly different language backgrounds.