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’ eyefixations
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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:Potsdam/oai:kobv.de-opus-ubp:5715 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Boston, Marisa Ferrara, Hale, John T., Vasishth, Shravan, Kliegl, Reinhold |
| 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 | Language and Cognitive Processes. - ISSN 0169-0965. - 26 (2011), 3, S. 301-349 |
| Rights | http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/doku/urheberrecht.php |
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