The Role of Information Theory in Gap-Filler Dependencies

The current study examines how formal grammar and information-theoretic complexity metrics can combine to account for processing cost incurred during incremental sentence comprehension. To this end, we modeled the eye-movement reading measures obtained from an experiment on the wh-in-situ construction in Mandarin Chinese. Framing our syntactic analysis in minimalist grammars, we obtained estimates of grammatical choice-point probabilities from the Penn Chinese Tree Bank, and derived values for two different complexity metrics, suprisal and entropy reduction, at each word of the target sentences. Both metrics accounted for a small but significant amount of the eye-movement data.