Related papers: Why are language models less surprised than humans…
Surprisal theory hypothesizes that the difficulty of human sentence processing increases linearly with surprisal, the negative log-probability of a word given its context. Computational psycholinguistics has tested this hypothesis using…
Humans exhibit garden path effects: When reading sentences that are temporarily structurally ambiguous, they slow down when the structure is disambiguated in favor of the less preferred alternative. Surprisal theory (Hale, 2001; Levy,…
Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown human-like abilities in many language tasks, sparking interest in comparing LLMs' and humans' language processing. In this paper, we conduct a detailed comparison of the two on a sentence…
A fundamental result in psycholinguistics is that less predictable words take a longer time to process. One theoretical explanation for this finding is Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), which quantifies a word's predictability as…
A recent study (Kuribayashi et al., 2025) has shown that human sentence processing behavior, typically measured on syntactically unchallenging constructions, can be effectively modeled using surprisal from early layers of large language…
How predictable a word is can be quantified in two ways: using human responses to the cloze task or using probabilities from language models (LMs).When used as predictors of processing effort, LM probabilities outperform probabilities…
Large language models (LLMs) that fluently converse with humans are a reality - but do LLMs experience human-like processing difficulties? We systematically compare human and LLM sentence comprehension across seven challenging linguistic…
Under surprisal theory, linguistic representations affect processing difficulty only through the bottleneck of surprisal. Our best estimates of surprisal come from large language models, which have no explicit representation of structural…
Are the predictions of humans and language models affected by similar things? Research suggests that while comprehending language, humans make predictions about upcoming words, with more predictable words being processed more easily.…
The effect of surprisal on processing difficulty has been a central topic of investigation in psycholinguistics. Here, we use eyetracking data to examine three language processing regimes that are common in daily life but have not been…
A wide body of evidence shows that human language processing difficulty is predicted by the information-theoretic measure surprisal, a word's negative log probability in context. However, it is still unclear how to best estimate these…
Language models (LMs) have been argued to overlap substantially with human beings in grammaticality judgment tasks. But when humans systematically make errors in language processing, should we expect LMs to behave like cognitive models of…
Intuitively, human readers cope easily with errors in text; typos, misspelling, word substitutions, etc. do not unduly disrupt natural reading. Previous work indicates that letter transpositions result in increased reading times, but it is…
Language models that are trained on the next-word prediction task have been shown to accurately model human behavior in word prediction and reading speed. In contrast with these findings, we present a scenario in which the performance of…
Using temporarily ambiguous garden-path sentences ("While the team trained the striker wondered ...") as a test case, we present a latent-process mixture model of human reading behavior across four different reading paradigms (eye tracking,…
Scientific breakthroughs typically emerge through the surprising violation of established research ideas, yet quantifying surprise has remained elusive because it requires a coherent model of all contemporary scientific worldviews. Deep…
Human translators linger on some words and phrases more than others, and predicting this variation is a step towards explaining the underlying cognitive processes. Using data from the CRITT Translation Process Research Database, we evaluate…
Novel metaphor comprehension involves complex semantic processes and linguistic creativity, making it an interesting task for studying language models (LMs). This study investigates whether surprisal, a probabilistic measure of…
Word-by-word language model surprisal is often used to model the incremental processing of human readers, which raises questions about how various choices in language modeling influence its predictive power. One factor that has been…
By positing a relationship between naturalistic reading times and information-theoretic surprisal, surprisal theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) provides a natural interface between language models and psycholinguistic models. This paper…