Parallel processing and sentence comprehension difficulty

Abstract

Eye fixation durations during normal reading correlate with processing difficulty but the specific cognitive mechanisms reflected in these measures are not well understood. This study finds support in German readers' eye fixations for two distinct difficulty metrics: surprisal, which reflects the change in probabilities across syntactic analyses as new words are integrated, and retrieval, which quantifies comprehension difficulty in terms of working memory constraints. We examine the predictions of both metrics using a family of dependency parsers indexed by an upper limit on the number of candidate syntactic analyses they retain at successive words. Surprisal models all fixation measures and regression probability. By contrast, retrieval does not model any measure in serial processing. As more candidate analyses are considered in parallel at each word, retrieval can account for the same measures as surprisal. This pattern suggests an important role for ranked parallelism in theories of sentence comprehension.

The ERP response to the amount of information conveyed by words in sentences

“…Several authors have put forth theoretical arguments for surprisal as a measure of cognitive processing effort or predictor of word reading time (Hale, 2001;Levy, 2008;Smith & Levy, 2008;Smith & Levy, 2013) and it is indeed well established by now that reading times correlate positively with the surprisal of words (Fernandez Monsalve, Frank, & Vigliocco, 2012;Fossum & Levy, 2012;Frank, 2014;Frank & Thompson, 2012;Mitchell, Lapata, Demberg, & Keller, 2010;Roark, Bachrach, Cardenas, & Pallier, 2009;Smith & Levy, 2013) as well as with the surprisal of parts-of-speech (Boston, Hale, Patil, Kliegl, & Vasishth, 2008;Boston, Hale, Vasishth, & Kliegl, 2011;Demberg & Keller, 2008;Frank & Bod, 2011).…”

Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics and its critical role in theory development: early beginnings and recent advances

“…As cross-linguistic coverage increases, it is becoming apparent that unitary accounts of processing difficulty are probably insufficient for capturing the empirical facts (cf. discussions in Boston, Hale, Vasishth, & Kliegl, 2011;Levy, Fedorenko, & Gibson, 2013;. This is a hard-won and important insight in a field with a strong bias towards simple, monocausal explanations.…”

Constructing covert dependencies—The case of Mandarin wh-in-situ dependency

“…This is not to claim that comprehenders are not making any syntactic expectations during incremental comprehension of the wh-in-situ construction. Generally speaking, there is good evidence that both expectation-based and memory-based parsing strategies make contributions to online comprehension difficulty (Boston, Hale, Vasishth, & Kliegl, 2011;Levy & Keller, 2013;Staub, 2010). In the particular case we examined here, a matrix predicate like ''wonder" strongly signals an interrogative complement, which narrows down the set of possible syntactic forms of the complement.…”