Readers pre-activate specific upcoming words before they appear

Correct: B — The N400 to the article ('a' vs. 'an') varied with the cloze probability of the noun expected to follow, indicating prediction of specific upcoming lexical forms

DeLong, Urbach & Kutas (2005) presented sentence contexts strongly biased toward a specific noun (e.g., 'The day was breezy so the boy went outside to fly...'). The continuation included an indefinite article — 'a kite' (expected) or 'an airplane' (unexpected) — followed by the noun. Crucially, the N400 amplitude on the article itself scaled gradedly with the cloze probability of the expected noun. Because the article alone cannot be semantically anomalous, the result is taken as direct evidence that comprehenders pre-activate specific upcoming word forms, not just abstract semantic features, well before they appear in the input stream.