Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis linksproduction strategies with comprehension processes,predicting that speakers will utilize flexibility in encoding inorder to increase uniformity in the rate of informationtransmission, as measured by surprisal (Jaeger, 2010).Evidence in support of UID comes primarily from studiesfocusing on word-level effects, e.g. demonstrating thatsurprisal predicts the omission/inclusion of optional words.Here we investigate whether comprehenders are sensitive tothe information density of alternative encodings that are moresyntactically complex. We manipulated the syntacticencoding of complex noun phrases in German via meaning-preserving pre-nominal and post-nominal modification incontexts that were either predictive or non-predictive. Wethen used the G-maze reading task to measure onlinecomprehension during self-paced reading. Results wereconsistent with the UID hypothesis. In predictive contexts,post-nominal encodings elicited a more uniform distributionof processing effort. Conversely, in non-predictive contexts,more uniform effort was found for pre-nominal encodings.