Towards a Bayesian hierarchical model of lexical processing

AbstractIn 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.