The relative strength of hierarchical structure and statistics differs across the measures in naturalistic reading 文章

arXiv:2509.23195v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The hierarchical syntactic structure and non-hierarchical, statistical, or sequential factors have long been framed as rival theories in accounting for online comprehension. A lot of evidence has shown that both hierarchical and non-hierarchical factors can shape comprehension and the more open question is when, and how strongly, hierarchy exerts its influence in comprehension. We addressed the question with co-registered EEG and eye-tracking, treating syntactic depth as the variable for operationalizing hierarchical structure. For the timing question, hierarchical syntactic structure is shown to influence reading before reading a sentence and can emerge as early as 108ms before reading. This is supported by both transitional probability analysis and regression on fixation-related potential.