Less is more: Probabilistic reduction is best explained by small-scale predictability measures

arXiv:2512.23659v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The primary research questions of this paper center on defining the amount of context that is necessary and/or appropriate when investigating the relationship between language model probabilities and cognitive phenomena. We investigate whether whole utterances are necessary to observe probabilistic reduction and demonstrate that n-gram representations suffice as cognitive units of planning.