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Uncertainty about the rest of the sentence
1Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages, Michigan State University.
Cognitive Science
|June 28, 2011
Summary
This study introduces a new metric for sentence processing complexity, measuring how much information each word adds to understanding sentence structure. This complexity metric aligns with human sentence memory experiment results.
Area of Science:
- Computational Linguistics
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Human sentence comprehension involves complex cognitive processes.
- Understanding the factors that influence processing difficulty is crucial for linguistic theories.
- Previous metrics have not fully captured the information-theoretic aspects of syntactic prediction.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop a novel word-by-word metric for quantifying human sentence processing complexity.
- To formalize the relationship between information content and syntactic structure in sentence comprehension.
- To test the metric's predictive power against empirical sentence memory data.
Main Methods:
- Formalizing processing complexity using conditional entropy of grammatical continuations.
- Extending entropy reduction concepts to infinite languages.
- Applying the metric to a mildly context-sensitive language with complex relative clauses.
- Correlating metric predictions with repetition accuracy from a sentence memory experiment.
Main Results:
- The proposed metric successfully quantifies word-level information contribution to syntactic structure.
- Predictions derived from the metric showed significant correlation with experimental repetition accuracy.
- The metric's formalization extends foundational entropy reduction ideas.
Conclusions:
- The developed metric provides a robust, information-theoretic measure of sentence processing complexity.
- This approach offers valuable insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying human sentence comprehension.
- The findings support the use of computational metrics in psycholinguistic research.
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