Parallel processing and sentence comprehension difficulty

  • 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.

Download full text files

  • SHA-1:14020dc58052ef9f2bc106f62192cd2bcac9401d

Export metadata

Additional Services

Search Google Scholar Statistics
Metadaten
Author details:Marisa Ferrara Boston, John T. Hale, Shravan VasishthORCiDGND, Reinhold KlieglORCiDGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-57159
Publication series (Volume number):Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe (paper 252)
Publication type:Postprint
Language:English
Publication year:2011
Publishing institution:Universität Potsdam
Release date:2011/12/13
Source:Language and Cognitive Processes. - ISSN 0169-0965. - 26 (2011), 3 , S. 301-349
Organizational units:Extern / Extern
Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Psychologie
DDC classification:4 Sprache / 40 Sprache / 400 Sprache
Institution name at the time of the publication:Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Psychologie
License (German):License LogoKeine öffentliche Lizenz: Unter Urheberrechtsschutz
External remark:This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published as:
Boston, Marisa Ferrara , Hale, John T. , Vasishth, Shravan and Kliegl, Reinhold(2011): Parallel processing and sentence comprehension difficulty, Language and Cognitive Processes, 26: 3, 301 — 349. - First published on: 17 January 2011 (iFirst)
DOI: 10.1080/01690965.2010.492228
2011 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
Accept ✔
This website uses technically necessary session cookies. By continuing to use the website, you agree to this. You can find our privacy policy here.