Abstract Sentence processing models posit that syntactic processing difficulty contributes to the processing time of each word (e.g., Lewis & Vasishth, 2005). On the other hand, the E-Z Reader 10 model of eye movements in reading (Reichle et al., 2009) proposes that syntactic processing affects eye movements only when integration of an input word fails. We present two eye movement experiments designed to address this tension. Readers were presented with ungrammatical sentences with a singular subject and a plural verb, but with a plural local noun that often induces an illusion of grammaticality, e.g., *The editor of the magazines are reviewing the articles before publication. After each critical sentence was removed from the screen, the reader made a binary acceptability judgment. When readers rejected the ungrammatical critical sentences, there was also pronounced disruption to incremental reading. However, on the majority of trials readers accepted these sentences, and on those trials the eye movement record revealed only a very small increase in reading time compared to corresponding grammatical sentences; critically, this small effect was entirely explained by the difference between conditions in the lexical surprisal of the verb. Thus, as predicted by E-Z Reader 10, an effect of agreement computation above and beyond the effect of surprisal was in evidence only when agreement computation failed, i.e., the sentence was rejected. We discuss implications for models of incremental sentence processing and reading.
Adrian Staub, Nathan Wolf, Brian Dillon· Open Mind· 0 citations
The question of whether the relationship between a word's predictability and its processing time is linear or logarithmic is of substantial theoretical importance, as it arbitrates between theories of the predictability effect (preactivation vs. surprisal) and has implications for sentence processing generally. While several previous corpus studies have obtained evidence for a logarithmic relationship, Brothers and Kuperberg (2021b) obtained evidence for a linear relationship in a large self-paced reading study with well-controlled experimental materials. Here, the authors use Brothers and Kuperberg's materials in an eye tracking during reading experiment. The authors find clear evidence for a logarithmic relationship between predictability and the eye-movement measures of first fixation duration and gaze duration; this relationship is clearest when using predictability estimates from the large language model Generative Pre-Trained Transformer-2, which can distinguish small differences in predictability at the low end of the scale. The authors find that this conclusion is robust to log transformation of the reading time measures, and the authors find that the relationship between predictability and the log odds of word skipping may also be logarithmic. These results support surprisal as an account of predictability effects in natural reading. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Ryan Buggy, Stephanie Cho, Cory Shain et al.· Journal of Experimental Psyc...· 1 citation
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