Uncertainty About the Rest of the Sentence

John Hale
2006 Cognitive Science  
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
more » ... ended 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) .
doi:10.1207/s15516709cog0000_64 pmid:21702829 fatcat:bor2fao2zraazbitr4eadjng7a