A model of local coherence effects in human sentence processing as consequences of updates from bottom-up prior to posterior beliefs

Klinton Bicknell, Roger Levy

Abstract: Human sentence processing involves integrating probabilistic knowledge from a variety of sources in order to incrementally determine the hierarchical structure for the serial input stream. While a large number of sentence processing effects have been explained in terms of comprehenders' rational use of probabilistic information, effects of local coherences have not. We present here a new model of local coherences, viewing them as resulting from a belief-update process, and show that the relevant probabilities in our model are calculable from a probabilistic Earley parser. Finally, we demonstrate empirically that an implemented version of the model makes the correct predictions for the materials from the original experiment demonstrating local coherence effects.