Analyzing Wrap-Up Effects through an Information-Theoretic Lens
This work addresses a specific issue in psycholinguistics by providing incremental insights into cognitive processes during reading, but it is limited to this domain.
The paper tackled the problem of understanding wrap-up effects in reading comprehension by analyzing their relationship with information-theoretic quantities like surprisal, finding that prior context information predicts reading times at sentence and clause ends but not in the middle.
Numerous analyses of reading time (RT) data have been implemented -- all in an effort to better understand the cognitive processes driving reading comprehension. However, data measured on words at the end of a sentence -- or even at the end of a clause -- is often omitted due to the confounding factors introduced by so-called "wrap-up effects," which manifests as a skewed distribution of RTs for these words. Consequently, the understanding of the cognitive processes that might be involved in these wrap-up effects is limited. In this work, we attempt to learn more about these processes by examining the relationship between wrap-up effects and information-theoretic quantities, such as word and context surprisals. We find that the distribution of information in prior contexts is often predictive of sentence- and clause-final RTs (while not of sentence-medial RTs). This lends support to several prior hypotheses about the processes involved in wrap-up effects.