Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.