Hypothesis
Readers pre-activate the sound of upcoming predictable words, so the N400 to the article before a noun would scale with how predictable the noun is, as DeLong et al. (2005) reported.
What failed
In a preregistered direct replication across 9 laboratories (N = 334), the noun effect replicated but the article effect did not, in either the preregistered or the single-trial analyses.
Broken assumption
Readers routinely pre-activate the phonological form of predictable upcoming words.
Why
Exploratory Bayesian analyses suggest the article effect may be non-zero but far smaller than originally reported, too small to see without very large samples. The authors conclude the results do not support routine pre-activation of word form.
From the published paper: Nieuwland et al. eLife, 2018. ↗CC BY