People have the capability to process text three times faster than they
would naturally read it, yet many current theories of sentence processing
rely on natural reading times as a proxy for processing difficulty. How can
people read material so quickly in spite of information processing
limitations? We conducted a novel self-paced rapid serial visual
presentation (RSVP) experiment to probe for sentence processing related
surprisal effects and to test how readers might compensate for information
processing limits during RSVP. We find support for sentence processing
related surprisal effects, the pattern of which is consistent with a
First-In, First-Out buffer model.