Trajectory Dynamics in Language Model Hidden States Predict Human Processing Costs Beyond Surprisal
Human language comprehension unfolds sequentially: each word is processed in the context of those that came before, and the interpretation builds incrementally over time. Surprisal, the negative log probability of a word given its context, has been the dominant predictor of incremental processing cost. But surprisal reduces rich sequential representations to a single scalar at each word, discarding information about the direction in which the interpretation has been evolving. Dynamical-systems approaches suggest that the trajectory of the evolving interpretive state, not just its position at each moment,should shape processing, and language itself may have local momentum, since speakers p...
| Authors | Elan Barenholtz |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 3 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 June 2026 |
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