Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 31, 2026

Experimental Research Examining How People Can Cope with Uncertainty Through Soft Haptic Sensations
Published on: September 16, 2015
Uncertainty about the rest of the sentence
1Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages, Michigan State University.
Abstract:
A word-by-word human sentence processing complexity metric is presented. This metric formalizes the intuition that comprehenders have more trouble on words contributing larger amounts of information about the syntactic structure of the sentence as a whole. The formalization is in terms of the conditional entropy of grammatical continuations, given the words that have been heard so far. To calculate the predictions of this metric, Wilson and Carroll's (1954) original entropy reduction idea is extended to infinite languages. This is demonstrated with a mildly context-sensitive language that includes relative clauses formed on a variety of grammatical relations across the Accessibility Hierarchy of Keenan and Comrie (1977). Predictions are derived that correlate significantly with repetition accuracy results obtained in a sentence-memory experiment (Keenan & Hawkins, 1987).
More Related Videos
05:22Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies
Published on: May 9, 2019
09:27Using Eye Movements Recorded in the Visual World Paradigm to Explore the Online Processing of Spoken Language
Published on: October 13, 2018
Related Concept Videos
Uncertainty: Overview
Propagation of Uncertainty from Random Error
Uncertainty: Confidence Intervals
The Uncertainty Principle
Uncertainty in Measurement: Reading Instruments
Propagation of Uncertainty from Systematic Error