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English relative clauses are a critical test case for theories of syntactic processing. Expectation- and memory-based accounts make opposing predictions, and behavioral experiments have found mixed results. We present a technical extension of Lossy Context Surprisal (LCS) and use it to model relative clause processing in three behavioral experiments. LCS predicts key results at distinct retention rates, showing that task-dependent memory demands can account for discrepant behavioral patterns in the literature.

EMNLP 2024

Lossy Context Surprisal Predicts Task-Dependent Patterns in Relative Clause Processing

language processing

surprisal

memory

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Lossy Context Surprisal Predicts Task-Dependent Patterns in Relative Clause Processing

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