Executive resources shape the impact of language predictability across the adult lifespan.

Abstract

Humans routinely anticipate upcoming language, but whether such predictions come at a cognitive cost remains debated. In this study, we demonstrate the resource-dependent nature of predictive mechanisms in language comprehension across the lifespan: Experimentally limiting executive resources through a concurrent task reduces the effect of language predictability on reading time. Participants (<i>N</i> = 175, replication <i>N</i> = 96) read short articles presented word-by-word while completing a secondary font colour <i>n</i>-back task, thus varying cognitive demand. Language predictability was indexed by word surprisal as derived from a pre-trained large language model (GPT-2). Across two independent samples, our findings reveal that language predictions are not cost-free: They draw on executive control resources, and this dependency becomes more pronounced with age (18-85 years). These results help resolve the debate over cognitive demands in language comprehension and highlight prediction as a dynamic, resource-dependent process across the lifespan.