What's new? A comprehension bias in favor of informativity

Language is used as a channel by which speakers convey, among other things, newsworthy and informative messages, i.e., content that otherwise unpredictable to the comprehender. We therefore might expect comprehenders show preference for such messages. However, comprehension studies tend emphasize opposite: processing ease situation-predictable (e.g., chopping carrots with knife). Comprehenders are known deploy knowledge about situation plausibility during in fine-grained context-sensitive ways. Using self-paced reading, we test whether can also this favor of yield informativity-driven effects alongside, or instead of, plausibility-driven effects. manipulate semantic context (unusual protagonists), syntactic construction (wh- clefts), communicative environment (text messages). Reading times (primarily sentence-finally) facilitation sentences containing shovel), where both at level because its atypicality word large number atypical elements speaker could potentially mention. Our first observable all, results highlight need models distinguish between comprehenders' estimate their speaker's decision talk content.