Predicting meaning in the dyad.

This study investigates the role of meaning prediction in dyadic interactions. Participants engaged in a semantic association game in which the predictability of upcoming word categories was manipulated. Results showed that predictability speeds up speech production in both interlocutors. Critically, our study reveals that meaning prediction not only aids language comprehension and subsequent speech production for the interlocutor completing a predictable sentence but enhances even more the response speed of the conversational partner formulating a reply. This result demonstrates an incremental dyadic prediction effect during language interaction. A control experiment in which participants performed the same task but in isolation confirmed that this effect is entirely driven by the interactive context. While participants showed a similar facilitation effect when completing predictable sentences as in the dyadic experiment, the prediction effect for formulating a reply disappeared. These findings reveal fundamental differences in predictive and linguistic processing during communicative interactions versus individual language use. They provide strong empirical support for theories of joint action and dialogue, which emphasize that successful social interaction relies on predicting and representing the linguistic information of both conversational partners.