Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People have the capability to process text three times fasterthan they would naturally read it, yet many current theories ofsentence processing rely on natural reading times as a proxyfor processing difficulty. How can people read material soquickly in spite of information processing limitations sug-gested by sentence processing theories? One possibility is thatsurprisal effects on reading time, the hallmark of processingdifficulty under sentence processing theories, might arise fromperceptual processing, implying no relation between surprisaland sentence processing difficulty. In this paper, we conducteda novel self-paced rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) ex-periment, which controlled perceptual processes to probe forsentence processing related surprisal effects. We further testedhow readers might compensate for information processing lim-its during RSVP. We find support for sentence processing re-lated surprisal effects, the pattern of which is consistent with aFirst-In, First-Out (FIFO) buffer model.