Syntactic Belief Update as the Driver of Garden Path Processing Difficulty
Garden path sentences present a processing difficulty for humans--- the sentence prefix leads the listener towards one interpretation, until the listener hears a critical word that shows that the initial interpretation was wrong. Lexical surprisal, a measure that usually predicts sentence processing difficulty quite well, fails to provide good predictions for garden path sentences. We propose an alternative that actively predicts a probability distribution over syntactic trees (its syntactic belief) and updates that distribution after each new word. If a processor is led down a garden path, syntactic beliefs will be wrong and will require a large update at the critical word. The magnitude...
| Authors | Alan Zhou, Miloš Stanojević, John T. Hale |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 25 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 August 2026 |
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