For more than a decade, connected and fruitful lines of research have shown that Swedish and Danish listeners use word- and clause-initial prosody to predict upcoming linguistic information. In spoken-word recognition, Swedish listeners take advantage of both tones – word accents – and segments at word onsets to predict how words are going to end. This is reflected in an event-related potential: the pre-activation negativity (PrAN). In a recent lexical decision study with English listeners, we found a functionally identical but reversed PrAN effect in event-related potentials. PrAN amplitudes increased as a function of lexical competition, suggesting an important role of task and paradigms in within-word prediction research, and indicating that listeners benefit from more dense lexical neighbourhoods when deciding whether an incoming word is real or not.