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{
    "pk": 50358,
    "title": "When unpredictable does not mean difficult to process",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "During language comprehension, words that are less expected tend to take more effort. This phenomenon has been described by the hypothesis that cognitive cost scales in surprisal (negative log probability; Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), with a core justification being that surprisal quantifies the amount by which a rational comprehender's beliefs about meaning change upon encountering a word. However, this focus on next-word prediction may be too narrow. In this work we advocate measuring processing cost directly with the size of the change in beliefs about meaning, a reframing which implies a novel class of potential situations where surprisal may systematically overestimate cost. We identify typographical errors as a test case, and implement estimators of surprisal and belief-update in a noisy-channel model of comprehension as inference about intended strings. In a self-paced reading time study, we present evidence that human reading time behaves as predicted by belief-update size, rather than surprisal.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Linguistics; Language Comprehension; Predictive Processing; Reading; Bayesian modeling"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Member Abstracts with Poster Presentation",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8b38160g",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Jacob",
            "middle_name": "Hoover",
            "last_name": "Vigly",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Massachusetts Institute of Technology",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Peng",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Qian",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Harvard University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Morgan",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Sonderegger",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "McGill University",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Timothy",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "O'Donnell",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "McGill University",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2025-01-02T00:00:00+06:00",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/50358/galley/38320/download/"
        }
    ]
}