ArticleCognitive science2020
Lossy-Context Surprisal: An Information-Theoretic Model of Memory Effects in Sentence Processing.
Article in Cognitive science, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 47 papers.
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47 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Eye movements reveal a dissociation between prediction and structural processing difficulty in language comprehension.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Eye-tracking-while-reading: A living survey of datasets with open library support.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Predictability effects during reading comprehension are not modulated by a visuospatial working memory load.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- To model human linguistic prediction, make LLMs less superhuman.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- Cloze, Frequency, Surprisal, or Plausibility? A Comparative Analysis of Predictors for Local Ambiguity Resolution.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Linguistic structure from a bottleneck on sequential information processing.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Evaluating the compatibility of predictive coding as a model of linguistic predictability effects in reading.Frontiers in cognition · 2026Review
- Word Trigram Frequency Predicts Failure to Detect Word Transpositions: Implications for Rational Inference in Reading.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Modeling Memory Effects in a Head-Final Language With Category Locality.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- The Nature of Noise Modulates Readers' Inferences for Transposition Errors of Reversible Words in Chinese Sentences.Journal of psycholinguistic research · 2025Article
- Sentence processing by humans and machines: Large language models as a tool to better understand human reading.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Noisy-channel language comprehension in aphasia: A Bayesian mixture modeling approach.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Syntactic Complexity Phenomena Are Better Explained Without Empty Elements Mediating Long-Distance Dependencies.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Computational Sentence-Level Metrics of Reading Speed and Its Ramifications for Sentence Comprehension.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Prediction in reading: A review of predictability effects, their theoretical implications, and beyond.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Natural language processing models reveal neural dynamics of human conversation.Nature communications · 2025Article
- A Simple Explanation for Harmonic Word Order.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- A Working Memory Model of Sentence Processing as Binding Morphemes to Syntactic Positions.Topics in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Exploring the dynamics of Shannon's information and iconicity in language processing and lexeme evolution.PloS one · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A key component of research on human sentence processing is to characterize the processing difficulty associated with the comprehension of words in context. Models that explain and predict this difficulty can be broadly divided into two kinds, expectation-based and memory-based. In this work, we present a new model of incremental sentence processing difficulty that unifies and extends key features of both kinds of models. Our model, lossy-context surprisal, holds that the processing difficulty at a word in context is proportional to the surprisal of the word given a lossy memory representation of the context-that is, a memory representation that does not contain complete information about previous words. We show that this model provides an intuitive explanation for an outstanding puzzle involving interactions of memory and expectations: language-dependent structural forgetting, where the effects of memory on sentence processing appear to be moderated by language statistics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that dependency locality effects, a signature prediction of memory-based theories, can be derived from lossy-context surprisal as a special case of a novel, more general principle called information locality.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.