arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 30

Reader Proficiency Shapes Layer-wise Surprisal Profiles

The study examines how reader proficiency influences the relationship between layer-wise surprisal from large language models (LLMs) and eye-tracking gaze measures. Using the MECO L2 corpus, researchers compared high- and low-proficiency readers on first-pass gaze duration (FPGD) and total gaze duration (TGD), finding that lower-proficiency readers exhibit deeper Predictive Depth for FPGD, while TGD shows deeper Predictive Depth across both groups. The results suggest that the distribution of predictive power across LLM layers relates to the timing and breadth of reading processes and varies with reader proficiency.

By Akio Hayakawa, Horacio Saggion
arXiv AI
Oct 7

STRUCTURALCOST: A controlled reading time dataset for modeling human sentence processing difficulty

STRUCTURALCOST is a self‑paced reading dataset comprising 475 participants and 40,800 observations that isolates the processing cost of long‑distance subject‑verb dependency resolution. The study replicates a known psycholinguistic finding at NLP scale: human reading times at the main verb increase with dependency length, driven by syntactic embedding beyond linear distance. Various language models—n‑gram, SSMs, and transformers—partially mirror this graded difficulty profile but consistently underestimate the integration cost humans incur, a gap that persists across architectures and model sizes.

By Nina Nusbaumer, Iria de-Dios-Flores, Corentin Bel, Christophe Pallier, Guillaume Wisniewski, Beno\^it Crabb\'e