Low-level language statistics affect reading times independently of surprisal

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Surprisal theory has provided a unifying framework for understanding many phenomena in sentence processing (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), positing that a word’s probability in context determines processing difficulty. Problematically for this claim, one low-level statistic, word frequency, has been shown to affect processing independently of surprisal. We present the first clear evidence that a more complex low-level statistic, word bigram probability, also affects processing independently of surprisal. These findings suggest a broad, independent role of low-level statistics in processing and motivate research into new generalizations of surprisal that can also explain why local statistical information should have an outsized effect.

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