It's well known that fluent speakers of a language have a “predictive engine”, the brain forecasts where a sentence is likely to go before it goes there. With every word it hears, it builds up a tree of likely possible candidates of the remainder of the sentence and prunes this tree again by eliminating possibilities after each word to the point of a sentence actually going in a completely unlikely and bizarre submarine, ehh, I mean direction shows up in brain scans as causing all kind of neurological spikes.
It stands to reason that this ability is what truly drives making reading and listening “easy”. It also stands to reason that this engine is based on the same underlying principle of being able to speak a language and output it and that it re-uses much of the same mechanisms to produce. After all, surely if one can predict the sentences of others one can just speak oneself. At the very least the opposite should happen? It therefore to me seems that “receptive bilinguals” that can understand sentences but cannot speak that most likely lack this engine, but I'm not sure how truthful that is, maybe it is possible to have it without being able to speak a language.
But what I do know is that I clearly lack this engine to a large degree for Japanese (TL) while having it in English to the same level as my native language. This is not a binary thing and I clearly have it for many common grammatical patterns but not for others but if I hear “助けな〜” in a certain context I just know already that “助けなくちゃいけない。”, “助けないと” or “助けなければならない” or something in that vein will follow. I'm sure people whose Japanese is far better than mine go one step further and by recognizing that some of them would not be natural in that context would not consider them possibilities.
This for me at least leads to an interesting situation when I consume whatever Japanese media and that is that there is a delay in comprehension. I only understand Japanese sentences about maybe 500 miliseconds after they are fully uttered and I heard the entire sentence. A more proficient speaker will understand them while half way through because he can predict the rest of the sentence already then. This is very much my experience with English or my native language. And I in fact do regularly output and am very much “conversation” in Japanese, just not “fluent” by any measure.
So, what's the deal here with receptive bilinguals? Are they actually truly capable of “fluently listening” without this predictive engine? Do they maybe have it after all even though they can't output? I've seen many people in Japanese language learning say they can “easily” listen to something and understand some text all the while seeing them make grave mistakes in their interpretation of which I'm like “I cannot see how you can say that this is “easy” to listen to for you if you weren't even aware of that grammar point and what it does here because if you don't know that your Japanese is surely worse than mine.”.
Can anyone chime in on this? Does anyone here actually feel that some language is truly as easy to listen to as their native language without this measurable “comprehension lag” that they can read just as quickly while also being unable to speak it and whether they feel they do have that predictive engine even though they cannot harness it to output?
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