An Information-Theoretic Perspective
an article by Stefan L. Frank and Gabriella Vigliocco (University College London) published in Information Volume 2 Issue 4 (2011)
Abstract
It has been argued that the mental representation resulting from sentence comprehension is not (just) an abstract symbolic structure but a “mental simulation” of the state-of-affairs described by the sentence. We present a particular formalisation of this theory and show how it gives rise to quantifications of the amount of syntactic and semantic information conveyed by each word in a sentence. These information measures predict simulated word-processing times in a dynamic connectionist model of sentence comprehension as mental simulation. A quantitatively similar relation between information content and reading time is known to be present in human reading-time data.
Full text (PDF 24pp) of completely fascinating information for anyone who loves words!
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