Sentence Comprehension as Mental Simulation: An Information-Theoretic Analysis and a Connectionist Model

Abstract

It has been argued that understanding a sentence comes down to mentally simulating the state-of-affairs described by the sentence. This paper presents a particular formalization of this idea and shows how it gives rise to measures of the amount of syntactic and semantic information conveyed by each word in a sentence. These information measures predict simulated word-processing times in a connectionist model of sentence comprehension.

Uncertainty Reduction as a Measure of Cognitive Load in Sentence Comprehension

“…One recent model (Frank, 2010) shows that the reading-time effects of both surprisal and entropy reduction can indeed result from a single processing mechanism. The model simulates sentence comprehension as the incremental and dynamical update of a non-linguistic representation of the state-of-affairs described by the sentence.…”