The impact of co-occurrence and context on the prediction of long-distance separable prefixes

Current inquiry into language processing focuses on predictive capabilities in anticipating words. This study investigates the predictability of separable verb prefixes in German, when they occur in sentence final position, often with much intervening material. Forty-nine speakers of German completed a cloze-task to measure their ability to predict missing sentence-final separable prefixes. The results are compared to statistics drawn from a corpus that show German speakers accurately predict sentence-final prefixes and accuracy is strongly correlated to both cue strength between particular prefix-verb pairs and the effect of contextual clues. The discussion links this work to the implications for evolutionary advantages of prediction via alignment and the ability to use corpora both for the creation and assessment of language testing procedures.