Parsing costs as predictors of reading difficulty: An evaluation using the Potsdam Sentence Corpus

• Main Authors: Marisa Ferrara Boston, John Hale, Reinhold Kliegl, Umesh Patil, Shravan Vasishth
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bern Open Publishing 2008-09-01
• Series: Journal of Eye Movement Research
• Subjects: surprisal; parsing costs; potsdam sentence corpus; parsing difficulty
• Online Access: https://bop.unibe.ch/JEMR/article/view/2255

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 frequency and bigram frequency (transitional probability), word length, and empirically-derived word predictability; the socalled “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.