Towards a Bayesian hierarchical model of lexical processing

Cassandra L Jacobs, Loïc Grobol


Abstract
In cases of pervasive uncertainty, cognitive systems benefit from heuristics or committing to more general hypotheses. Here we have presented a hierarchical cognitive model of lexical processing that synthesizes advances in early rational cognitive models with modern-day neural architectures. Probabilities of higher-order categories derived from layers extracted from the middle layers of an encoder language model have predictive power in accounting for several reading measures for both predicted and unpredicted words and influence even early first fixation duration behavior. The results suggest that lexical processing can take place within a latent, but nevertheless discrete, space in cases of uncertainty.
Anthology ID:
2025.cmcl-1.21
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
Editors:
Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Giulia Rambelli, Ece Takmaz, Philipp Wicke, Jixing Li, Byung-Doh Oh
Venues:
CMCL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
165–171
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.cmcl-1.21/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Cassandra L Jacobs and Loïc Grobol. 2025. Towards a Bayesian hierarchical model of lexical processing. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, pages 165–171, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards a Bayesian hierarchical model of lexical processing (Jacobs & Grobol, CMCL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.cmcl-1.21.pdf