Information Density and Dependency Length as Complementary Cognitive Models

Abstract

Certain English constructions permit two syntactic alternations. (1) a. I looked up the number. b. I looked the number up. (2) a. He is often at the office. b. He often is at the office. This study investigates the relationship between syntactic alternations and processing difficulty. What cognitive mechanisms are responsible for our attraction to some alternations and our aversion to others?This article reviews three psycholinguistic models of the relationship between syntactic alternations and processing: Maximum Per Word Surprisal (building on the ideas of Hale, in Proceedings of the 2nd Meeting of the North American chapter of the association for computational linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics, Pittsburgh, PA, pp 159-166, 2001), Uniform Information Density (UID) (Levy and Jaeger in Adv Neural Inf Process Syst 19:849-856, 2007; inter alia), and Dependency Length Minimization (DLM) (Gildea and Temperley in Cognit Sci 34:286-310, 2010). Each theory makes predictions about which alternations native speakers should favor. Subjects were recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk and asked to judge which of two competing syntactic alternations sounded more natural. Logistic regression analysis on the resulting data suggests that both UID and DLM are powerful predictors of human preferences. We conclude that alternations that approach uniform information density and minimize dependency length are easier to process than those that do not.

Signal Smoothing and Syntactic Choices: A Critical Reflection on the UID Hypothesis

“…This was confirmed by Meister et al ( 2021 ). Collins ( 2014 ) showed a relationship between information structure and linguistic acceptability, Meister et al ( 2021 ) confirmed this for both grammaticality and acceptability.…”

“Um…, it’s really difficult to… um… speak fluently”: Neural tracking of spontaneous speech

“…In attempt to move towards studying language under more naturalistic conditions, such metrics can be useful when studying uncontrolled stimuli such as speech, as recently been shown by studies that associated such scores with fluctuations in the neural response (Brennan et al, 2016;Nelson et al, 2017;Lopopolo et al, 2021;Shain et al, 2021). Here we used the mean-dependency distance (MDD), computed per clause, which has been hypothesized to reflect working memory demands (Liu, 2008;Gildea and Temperley, 2010;Collins, 2014;Futrell et al, 2015;Liu et al, 2017), yet to our knowledge, the neural correlates of MDD have not been tested before. Syntactic analysis of spontaneous speech is further complicated by the presence of disfluencies and imperfections.…”

The Peculiarities of the Perception and Understanding of Sonnets Written by W. Shakespeare by the Students of the Faculty of Foreign Languages

“…We have come up with some examples of school poetry of the nonsense of the XIII-th century, which can be considered the most ancient examples of this genre. In addition, we can be sure that meaningless of rhyme-songs were sung by children and repeated by adults from ancient times, since there was a whole magic of nonsense, and magic formulas often consisted of syllables that had preserved rhyme or rhythm till the current period of time, but had lost any meaning, which they could contain from the very beginning (Collins, 2014;Cummine, Aalto, Ostevik, Cheema & Hodgetts, 2018). Also the same we can tell about the sonnets of W. Shakespeare, because a lot of scientists (Esslin, 1987;Shportun, 2018;Stockwell, 2002) told that these sonnets were, in a great degree, diffi cult to understand.…”