{"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":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/50358/galley/38320/download/"}]}