Surprisal theory posits that less-predictable words should take more time to process, with
word predictability quantified as surprisal, ie, negative log probability in context. While
evidence supporting the predictions of surprisal theory has been replicated widely, much of
it has focused on a very narrow slice of data: native English speakers reading English texts.
Indeed, no comprehensive multilingual analysis exists. We address this gap in the current
literature by investigating the relationship between surprisal and reading times in eleven …

A fundamental result in psycholinguistics is that less predictable words take a longer time to
process. One theoretical explanation for this finding is Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy,
2008), which quantifies a word's predictability as its surprisal, ie its negative log-probability
given a context. While evidence supporting the predictions of Surprisal Theory have been
replicated widely, most have focused on a very narrow slice of data: native English speakers
reading English texts. Indeed, no comprehensive multilingual analysis exists. We address …