@misc{BostonHaleKliegletal.2008,
  author    = {Boston, Marisa Ferrara and Hale, John and Kliegl, Reinhold and Patil, Umesh and Vasishth, Shravan},
  title     = {Parsing costs as predictors of reading difficulty: An evaluation using the Potsdam Sentence Corpus},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-57139},
  year      = {2008},
  abstract  = {The surprisal of a word on a probabilistic grammar constitutes a promising complexity metric for human sentence comprehension difficulty. Using two different grammar types, surprisal is shown to have an effect on fixation durations and regression probabilities in a sample of German readers' eye movements, the Potsdam Sentence Corpus. A linear mixed-effects model was used to quantify the effect of surprisal while taking into account unigram and bigram frequency, word length, and empirically-derived word predictability; the so-called "early" and "late" measures of processing difficulty both showed an effect of surprisal. Surprisal is also shown to have a small but statistically non-significant effect on empirically-derived predictability itself. This work thus demonstrates the importance of including parsing costs as a predictor of comprehension difficulty in models of reading, and suggests that a simple identification of syntactic parsing costs with early measures and late measures with durations of post-syntactic events may be difficult to uphold.},
  language  = {en}
}