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

AbstractEnglish 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.