A word’s predictability or surprisal, as determined by cloze
probabilities or language models (e.g. Frank, Otten, Galli, &
Vigliocco, 2015) is related to processing effort, in that less ex-
pected words take more effort to process (e.g. Hale, 2001). A
words surprisal, however, may also be influenced by the non-
linguistic context, such as visual cues: In the visual world
paradigm (VWP), for example, anticipatory eye movements
suggest that comprehenders exploit the scene to predict what
will be mentioned next (Altmann & Kamide, 1999). How vi-
sual context affects word surprisal and processing effort, how-
ever, remains unclear. Here, we present evidence that visually-
determined probabilistic expectations for a spoken target word
predict graded processing effort for that word, in both pupil-
lometric (ICA) and ERP (N400) measures. These findings
demonstrate that the non-linguistic context can immediately
influence both lexical expectations, and surprisal-based pro-
cessing effort.