Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It has been claimed that larger semantic distance between thewords of a sentence, as quantified by a distributional seman-tics model, increases both N400 size and word-reading time.The current study shows that the reading-time effect disap-pears when word surprisal is factored out, suggesting that theearlier findings were caused by a confound between semanticdistance and surprisal. This absence of a behavioural effectof semantic distance (in the presence of a strong neurophysi-ological effect) may be due to methodological differences be-tween eye-tracking and EEG experiments, but it can also beinterpreted as evidence that eye movements are optimized forreading efficiency.