Have you ever known what a friend was about to say before they finished their sentence? Maybe someone starts telling a familiar story and you can already guess the ending. Or perhaps a coworker pauses during a meeting and you immediately begin preparing an answer before they finish asking the question. Psychology suggests that these experiences are not simply coincidences. During conversation, the brain constantly uses context, previous experience, language patterns and knowledge about the other person to anticipate what might come next. Researchers studying language comprehension have found evidence that listeners generate predictions about upcoming words and meanings as conversations unfold.
A 2018 review by psychologists Martin J. Pickering and Chiara Gambi concluded that prediction occurs at multiple levels of language, from meaning to linguistic form. More recent research continues to examine exactly how these predictions are generated and how much they vary between people.
