The effects of word predictability and shared semantic similarity between a target word and other words that could have taken its place in a sentence on language comprehension are investigated using data from a reading time study, a sentence completion study, and linear mixed-effects regression modeling. We find that processing is facilitated if…

Probability matching is a suboptimal behavior that often plagues human decision-making in simple repeated choice tasks. Despite decades of research, recent studies cannot find agreement on what choice strategies lead to probability matching. We propose a solution, showing that two distinct local choice strategies--which make different demands on…

According to Adams's Thesis, the acceptability of an indicative conditional sentence goes by the conditional probability of its consequent given its antecedent. We test, for the first time, whether this thesis is descriptively correct and show that it is not; in particular, we show that it yields the wrong predictions for people's judgments of the…

There is much debate over the degree to which language learning is governed by innate language-specific biases, or acquired through cognition-general principles. Here we examine the probabilistic language acquisition hypothesis on three levels: We outline a novel theoretical result showing that it is possible to learn the exact "generative model"…

Two auditory lexical decision experiments document for morphologically complex words two points at which the probability of a target word given the evidence shifts dramatically. The first point is reached when morphologically unrelated competitors are no longer compatible with the evidence. Adapting terminology from Marslen-Wilson (1984), we refer…

Young children are able to judge which of two possibilities is more likely to occur when these possibilities are characterized by a simple property, like color ("Is it more likely to draw a red chip or a blue chip?"). Here we ask whether they can do so when the possibilities concern a relation between simple properties ("Is it more likely to draw…

Numerous recent studies suggest that human learners, including both infants and adults, readily track sequential statistics computed between adjacent elements. One such statistic, transitional probability, is typically calculated as the likelihood that one element predicts another. However, little is known about whether listeners are sensitive to…

This paper investigates the role of resource allocation as a source of processing difficulty in human sentence comprehension. The paper proposes a simple information-theoretic characterization of processing difficulty as the work incurred by resource reallocation during parallel, incremental, probabilistic disambiguation in sentence comprehension,…

People's reactions to coincidences are often cited as an illustration of the irrationality of human reasoning about chance. We argue that coincidences may be better understood in terms of rational statistical inference, based on their functional role in processes of causal discovery and theory revision. We present a formal definition of…

Cohen's (TM 504 890) formal rules of intuitive probability lack normative or descriptive appeal, and his interpretation of the author's findings is not compelling. (CP)

Until recently, norms of experimental reasoning have lacked systematic theoretical development. Thus, it has been easy for psychologists like Tversky and Kahneman to misclassify certain human reasoning processes as being Pascalian and invalid, rather than as being Baconian and valid. (CP)