The surprisal of a word on a probabilistic grammar constitutes a promising
complexity metric for human sentence comprehension difficulty. Using two different grammar types, surprisal is shown to have an effect on fixation durations and regression probabilities in a sample of German readers’ eye movements, the Potsdam Sentence Corpus. A linear mixed-effects model was used to quantify the effect of surprisal while taking into account unigram and bigram frequency, word length, and empirically-derived word predictability; the so-called “early” and “late” measures of processing difficulty both showed an effect of surprisal. Surprisal is also shown to have a small but statistically non-significant effect on empirically-derived predictability itself. This work thus demonstrates the importance of including parsing costs as a predictor of
comprehension difficulty in models of reading, and suggests that a simple identification of syntactic parsing costs with early measures and late measures with durations of post-syntactic events may be difficult to uphold.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:Potsdam/oai:kobv.de-opus-ubp:5713 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Boston, Marisa Ferrara, Hale, John, Kliegl, Reinhold, Patil, Umesh, Vasishth, Shravan |
| Publisher | Universität Potsdam, Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät. Institut für Psychologie, Extern. Extern |
| Source Sets | Potsdam University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Postprint |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Journal of Eye Movement Research. - ISSN 1995-8692. - 2 (2008), 1, S. 1-12 |
| Rights | http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/doku/urheberrecht.php |
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