Surprisal Theory is Tautological (without Rational Grounding)
Surprisal theory holds that the human processing difficulty of a linguistic unit in context is an affine function of its surprisal under some language model. I argue this claim is a tautology without further constraint: for any non-negative difficulty measure over units in context, there exists a language model whose surprisal is an affine function of it under mild technical conditions. Therefore, because any pattern of difficulty is consistent with some language model, without an additional constraint on the language model, surprisal theory makes no falsifiable predictions. The tautology was long obscured by an assumption implicit in two decades of psycholinguistic work---that the releva...
| Authors | Ryan Cotterell |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 23 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 October 2026 |
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