Effects of Surprisal and Locality on Danish Sentence Processing: An Eye-Tracking Investigation
Laura Winther Balling1, Johannes Kizach2
1Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School, Dalgas Have 15, 2000, Frederiksberg, Copenhagen, Denmark. lwb.msc@cbs.dk.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
|March 24, 2017
Summary
Sentence processing is primarily driven by locality, not surprisal. An eye-tracking study found local syntactic relations speed up comprehension, while surprisal effects were minimal, supporting locality-based theories.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Computational Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Two main theories explain sentence processing: locality-based theories and surprisal theory.
- Locality theories predict easier processing when syntactic elements are close.
- Surprisal theory suggests processing difficulty increases with unexpected linguistic input.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the predictive power of locality and surprisal in Danish sentence processing.
- To compare lexicalized and syntactic surprisal effects.
- To determine which theory better explains human sentence comprehension.
Main Methods:
- An eye-tracking experiment was conducted using Danish sentences.
- Participants' reading times were measured while processing sentences.
- Lexicalized surprisal (trigram probabilities) and syntactic surprisal (expectedness of postverbal NPs) were manipulated.
Main Results:
- A significant processing advantage was observed for local syntactic relations.
- Lexicalized surprisal showed a marginal effect on processing time.
- Syntactic surprisal did not have a significant effect on processing.
Conclusions:
- Locality is a robust predictor of sentence processing efficiency.
- Surprisal has a limited, possibly context-dependent, role in sentence comprehension.
- Findings support locality-based accounts over surprisal-based accounts in this context.
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