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Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects
Published on: November 30, 2018
Eye movements reveal a dissociation between prediction and structural processing difficulty in language comprehension
William Timkey1, Kuan-Jung Huang2, Byung-Doh Oh3
1Department of Linguistics, New York University, New York, NY 10003.
Summary
Language model surprisal predicts early reading difficulties in ambiguous sentences. However, significant extra reading time is needed for error correction, which surprisal does not explain.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Computational Linguistics
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Syntactically ambiguous sentences disrupt reading, causing eye movements like rereading.
- Two main theories explain these disruptions: word predictability (surprisal) or structure-building errors.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether language model surprisal explains reading disruptions caused by syntactic ambiguity.
- To differentiate between predictability-based and error-correction-based explanations for reading difficulty.
Main Methods:
- Large-scale eye-tracking study with 409 language model surprisal estimates.
- Analysis of reading patterns in syntactically challenging sentences.
Main Results:
- Language model surprisal effectively models early reading effects during syntactic disambiguation.
- A significant increase in rereading time indicates an additional cost not captured by surprisal.
Conclusions:
- Surprisal accounts for routine language structure building.
- The cost of detecting and correcting structural errors during reading is not explained by current surprisal metrics.
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