Beyond Surprising: English Event Structure in the Maze

maze task
surprisal
event structure
paper
Author

Lisa Levinson

Published

January 20, 2023

Paper in ELM 2 Proceedings.

Are there grammatical properties of verbs that influence processing beyond surprisal? Results of modeling maze task data along with a fixed effect of GPT2 surprisal support an independent contribution of event structure complexity to incremental processing above and beyond surprisal in the slower but more incremental maze task. Comparison of maze to self-paced reading suggests that such effects may only be separable with more focal and larger effects that allow for teasing apart multiple fine-grained contributions to sentence processing.

Paper self-paced reading experiment demo OSF repository