title: Uncertainty reduction as a measure of cognitive load in sentence comprehension.
abstract: The entropy-reduction hypothesis claims that the cognitive processing difficulty on a word in sentence context is determined by the word's effect on the uncertainty about the sentence. Here, this hypothesis is tested more thoroughly than has been done before, using a recurrent neural network for estimating entropy and self-paced reading for obtaining measures of cognitive processing load. Results show a positive relation between reading time on a word and the reduction in entropy due to processing that word, supporting the entropy-reduction hypothesis. Although this effect is independent from the effect of word surprisal, we find no evidence that these two measures correspond to cognitively distinct processes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive, Perceptual, and Brain Sciences, University College London, UK. s.frank@ucl.ac.uk
authors.forename: Stefan L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Frank
mesh_terms: D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D011932:Reading; D013997:Time Factors; D035501:Uncertainty
keywords: Cognitive load; Entropy reduction; Recurrent neural network; Self-paced reading; Sentence comprehension; Surprisal; Word information