Information-theoretic complexity metrics, such as Surprisal (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) and Entropy Reduction (Hale, 2003), are linking hypotheses that bridge theorized expectations about sentences and observed processing difficulty in comprehension. These expectations can be viewed as syntactic derivations constrained by a grammar. However, this…

Two experiments used eyetracking during reading to examine the processing of the matrix verb following object and subject relative clauses. The experiments show that the processing of the matrix verb following an object relative is indeed slowed compared to the processing of the same verb following a subject relative. However, this difficulty is…