Most event-related brain potential (ERP) studies that showed the role of anticipation processes during sentence processing focused on reading. However, in everyday conversation speech unfolds at higher speed; the present study examines whether comprehenders anticipate words when processing auditory sentences. In high-constrained Spanish sentences, we time-locked ERPs on the article preceding the critical noun, which was muted to avoid overlapping effects. Articles that mismatched the gender of the expected nouns triggered an early (200–280 ms) and a late negativity (450–900 ms), suggesting that anticipation processes are at play also during speech processing. A subsequent lexical recognition task revealed that (muted) “expected” words were (falsely) recognised significantly more often than (muted) “unexpected” words, and as often as “old” words that were actually presented. These results suggest that anticipation processes allow creating a memory trace of a word prior to presentation. The findings support a top-down view of spoken sentence comprehension.

This work was supported by the Spanish Government [grant number PSI2011-23033], [grant number CONSOLIDER-INGENIO2010 CSD2007-00048], [grant number ECO2011-25295], [grant number ECO2010-09555-E]; the Catalan Government [grant number SGR 2009-1521]; the 7th Framework Programme [grant number AThEME 613465].