Listeners can predict what speakers will say: Study

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A new study has revealed that human brain works in a predictive way, while a person is listening to others.

According to the study, listeners can predict what the other person is going to say as the speakers' and the listeners' brains activity is similar.

Suzanne Dikker, the study's lead author and a post-doctoral researcher in New York University's Department of Psychology and Utrecht University, said that their findings show that the brains of both speakers and listeners take language predictability into account, resulting in more similar brain activity patterns between the two.

The researchers said that when listen predicts what speaker is going to say, their brains take advantage of this by sending a signal to their auditory cortex that it can expect sound patterns corresponding to predicted words.

It was found that activity patterns in brain areas where spoken words are processed were more similar between the listeners and the speaker when the listeners could predict what the speaker was going to say.

The study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.