Recent evidence supports a role for coreference processing in guiding human expectations about upcoming words during reading, based on covariation between reading times and word surprisal estimated by a coreference-aware semantic processing model (Ja
ffe et al. 2020).The present study reproduces and elaborates on this finding by (1) enabling the parser to process subword information that might better approximate human morphological knowledge, and (2) extending evaluation of coreference effects from self-paced reading to human brain imaging data. Results show that an expectation-based processing effect of coreference is still evident even in the presence of the stronger psycholinguistic baseline provided by the subword model, and that the coreference effect is observed in both self-paced reading and fMRI data, providing evidence of the effect's robustness.
While there exist scores of natural languages, each with its unique features and idiosyncrasies, they all share a unifying theme: enabling human communication. We may thus reasonably predict that human cognition shapes how these languages evolve and
are used. Assuming that the capacity to process information is roughly constant across human populations, we expect a surprisal--duration trade-off to arise both across and within languages. We analyse this trade-off using a corpus of 600 languages and, after controlling for several potential confounds, we find strong supporting evidence in both settings. Specifically, we find that, on average, phones are produced faster in languages where they are less surprising, and vice versa. Further, we confirm that more surprising phones are longer, on average, in 319 languages out of the 600. We thus conclude that there is strong evidence of a surprisal--duration trade-off in operation, both across and within the world's languages.
