Expectation-based syntactic comprehension

@article{citeulike:2366588, abstract = {This paper investigates the role of resource allocation as a source of processing difficulty in human sentence comprehension. The paper proposes a simple information-theoretic characterization of processing difficulty as the work incurred by resource reallocation during parallel, incremental, probabilistic disambiguation in sentence comprehension, and demonstrates its equivalence to the theory of Hale [Hale, J. (2001). A probabilistic Earley parser as a psycholinguistic model. In Proceedings of NAACL (Vol. 2, pp. 159-166)], in which the difficulty of a word is proportional to its surprisal (its negative log-probability) in the context within which it appears. This proposal subsumes and clarifies findings that high-constraint contexts can facilitate lexical processing, and connects these findings to well-known models of parallel constraint-based comprehension. In addition, the theory leads to a number of specific predictions about the role of expectation in syntactic comprehension, including the reversal of locality-based difficulty patterns in syntactically constrained contexts, and conditions under which increased ambiguity facilitates processing. The paper examines a range of established results bearing on these predictions, and shows that they are largely consistent with the surprisal theory.}, author = {Levy, Roger }, citeulike-article-id = {2366588}, doi = {10.1016/j.cognition.2007.05.006}, journal = {Cognition}, keywords = {lexical-processing, models, syntactic-priming}, month = {March}, number = {3}, pages = {1126--1177}, posted-at = {2008-02-12 16:52:34}, priority = {4}, title = {Expectation-based syntactic comprehension}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.05.006}, volume = {106}, year = {2008} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:2366588 L3 - citeulike-article-id:2366588 TI - Expectation-based syntactic comprehension JF - Cognition VL - 106 IS - 3 SP - 1126 EP - 1177 N2 - This paper investigates the role of resource allocation as a source of processing difficulty in human sentence comprehension. The paper proposes a simple information-theoretic characterization of processing difficulty as the work incurred by resource reallocation during parallel, incremental, probabilistic disambiguation in sentence comprehension, and demonstrates its equivalence to the theory of Hale [Hale, J. (2001). A probabilistic Earley parser as a psycholinguistic model. In Proceedings of NAACL (Vol. 2, pp. 159-166)], in which the difficulty of a word is proportional to its surprisal (its negative log-probability) in the context within which it appears. This proposal subsumes and clarifies findings that high-constraint contexts can facilitate lexical processing, and connects these findings to well-known models of parallel constraint-based comprehension. In addition, the theory leads to a number of specific predictions about the role of expectation in syntactic comprehension, including the reversal of locality-based difficulty patterns in syntactically constrained contexts, and conditions under which increased ambiguity facilitates processing. The paper examines a range of established results bearing on these predictions, and shows that they are largely consistent with the surprisal theory. KW - lexical-processing KW - models KW - syntactic-priming AU - Levy, Roger PY - 2008/03// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2007.05.006 ER -