Modelling Reading Behaviour Regarding Locality and Expectation Effect using an ACT-R Model

Abstract

Readers experience processing difficulties in multiple situations. Two theories regarding processing difficulties are the dependency locality theory and the surprisal theory. These theories explain processing difficulty in a contradicting manner. Both effects in the theories have been proven to exist. In order to accurately model reading behaviour, a model has to implement the effects in the correct situation. The ACT-R model tries to mimics this reading behaviour. A corpus of 20 sentences from other researches and eight self-constructed sentences is used to test if the model experiences the same word processing difficulties. The model’s performance showed some discrepancies in which some aspects of the theories were correctly modelled and some were not. This shows that the ACT-R model has useful properties in modelling reading behaviour, but is susceptible to improvements.