Syntactic Belief Update as the Driver of Garden Path Processing Difficulty

Abstract:Garden path sentences present a processing difficulty for humans--- the sentence prefix leads the listener towards one interpretation, until the listener hears a critical word that shows that the initial interpretation was wrong. Lexical surprisal, a measure that usually predicts sentence processing difficulty quite well, fails to provide good predictions for garden path sentences. We propose an alternative that actively predicts a probability distribution over syntactic trees (its syntactic belief) and updates that distribution after each new word. If a processor is led down a garden path, syntactic beliefs will be wrong and will require a large update at the critical word. The magnitude of the update is measured with a generalized Rényi divergence. Crucially, this metric is dependent on lexical items, but is fully independent of the probability of lexical items. This Syntactic Belief Update provides a better fit to the human reading time data on garden path sentences. This suggests a new research direction examining purely non-lexical alternatives to surprisal for psycholinguistics.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2606.27206 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2606.27206v2 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.27206 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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