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In human sentence processing, cognitive load can be defined many ways. This report considers a definition of cognitive load in terms of the total probability of structural options that have been disconfirmed at some point in a sentence: the surprisal of word wi given its prefix wo...i-1 on a phrase-structural language model. These loads can be efficiently calculated using a probabilistic Earley parser (Stolcke, 1995) which is interpreted as generating predictions about reading time on a word-by-word basis. Under grammatical assumptions supported by corpus-frequency data, the operation of Stolcke's probabilistic Earley parser correctly predicts processing phenomena associated with garden path structural ambiguity and with the subject/object relative asymmetry.
John Hale (2001) studied this question.