Surprising parser actions and reading difficulty

  • Authors:
  • Marisa Ferrara Boston;John Hale;Reinhold Kliegl;Shravan Vasishth

  • Affiliations:
  • Michigan State University;Michigan State University;Potsdam University Germany;Potsdam University Germany

  • Venue:
  • HLT-Short '08 Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Human Language Technologies: Short Papers
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

An incremental dependency parser's probability model is entered as a predictor in a linear mixed-effects model of German readers' eye-fixation durations. This dependency-based predictor improves a baseline that takes into account word length, n-gram probability, and Cloze predictability that are typically applied in models of human reading. This improvement obtains even when the dependency parser explores a tiny fraction of its search space, as suggested by narrow-beam accounts of human sentence processing such as Garden Path theory.