ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
Large-scale evidence for logarithmic effects of word predictability on reading time.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed.
- Preserved topography, lateralization, selectivity, and functional connectivity of the language network in older brains.Nature communications · 2026Article
- 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
- Predictability effects during reading comprehension are not modulated by a visuospatial working memory load.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Cognitive Processes of Probabilistic Prediction in Reading: Language Model Surprisal Across Model Sizes, Token Granularity, and Reading Paradigms.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
- Listeners near-optimally integrate acoustic and semantic cues in spoken word recognition: Evidence from experiments manipulating cue order and reliability.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- To model human linguistic prediction, make LLMs less superhuman.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- Reading to Translate or Translating to Read? Modeling Translators' Eye Movements with Multilingual Pre-Trained Models.Journal of eye movement research · 2026Article
- Munich Sentence (MuSe) Database: Completion norms and audio recordings for 619 German sentences.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Article
- Working Memory, Attention Control, and Vocabulary Retention in AI (ChatGPT)-Assisted Foreign Language Learning: A Structural Cognitive Modelling Approach.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
- Cloze, Frequency, Surprisal, or Plausibility? A Comparative Analysis of Predictors for Local Ambiguity Resolution.Cognitive science · 2026Article
- Executive resources shape the impact of language predictability across the adult lifespan.eLife · 2026Article
- A quantum-cognitive approach to dynamic meaning construction.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Agreement Errors Disrupt Eye Movements in Reading Only When They Are Detected.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- The neurobiology of human sequential signal prediction: Insights from language, music, and mathematics.Neuroscience research · 2026Review
- Modeling Memory Effects in a Head-Final Language With Category Locality.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Large Language Models as Distributional Baselines for Language Tasks.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Sentence processing by humans and machines: Large language models as a tool to better understand human reading.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- The HeCz corpus: A large, richly annotated reading corpus of newspaper headlines in Czech.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Increasing alignment of large language models with language processing in the human brain.Nature computational science · 2025Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
During real-time language comprehension, our minds rapidly decode complex meanings from sequences of words. The difficulty of doing so is known to be related to words' contextual predictability, but what cognitive processes do these predictability effects reflect? In one view, predictability effects reflect facilitation due to anticipatory processing of words that are predictable from context. This view predicts a linear effect of predictability on processing demand. In another view, predictability effects reflect the costs of probabilistic inference over sentence interpretations. This view predicts either a logarithmic or a superlogarithmic effect of predictability on processing demand, depending on whether it assumes pressures toward a uniform distribution of information over time. The empirical record is currently mixed. Here, we revisit this question at scale: We analyze six reading datasets, estimate next-word probabilities with diverse statistical language models, and model reading times using recent advances in nonlinear regression. Results support a logarithmic effect of word predictability on processing difficulty, which favors probabilistic inference as a key component of human language processing.
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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.