STRUCTURALCOST: A controlled reading time dataset for modeling human sentence processing difficulty

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.08208v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce STRUCTURALCOST, a self-paced reading dataset of 475 participants and 40,800 observations isolating the processing cost of long-distance subject-verb dependency resolution. We replicate a low-powered psycholinguistic finding at NLP scale, namely that human reading times at the main verb increase with dependency length, driven by syntactic embedding beyond linear distance. Different language models -- spanning n-gram models, SSMs, and tr