The information-processing difficulty of incremental parsing
John Hale · 2004
When an incremental parser gets the next word, its expectations about upcoming grammatical structures can change. When a word greatly constrains these grammatical expectations, uncertainty is reduced. This elimination of possibilities constitutes information processing work. Formalizing this notion of information processing work yields a complexity metric that predicts human repetition accuracy scores across a systematic class of linguistic phenomena, the Accessibility Hierarchy of relativizable grammatical relations.