Beyond Surprising: English Event Structure in the Maze (HSP 2022)

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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.

HSP2022 Program Resources