The games words and contexts play: how readers navigate syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations

While previous studies have focused on how contextual elements influence reading, our research adopts a novel approach to the dynamic interaction between words and their context. Using eye movements during naturalistic Serbian sentence reading, we analysed how both morphological and semantic information carried by consecutive nouns in a sentence impact reading behaviour. We considered a broad range of potential predictors, categorised as either benchmark (word length and frequency), paradigmatic (relative entropy, letter-triplet activation and competition), or syntagmatic (cosine similarity, contextual similarity and typicality) to predict four eye movement measures: landing position, first fixation duration, total fixation duration, and average pupil size. A multivariate statistical model that enabled simultaneous testing of multiple predictors against several dependent variables revealed a complex interaction among word properties within context. While previously identified predictors such as length and frequency come out strong, our approach reveals the relational nature of word- and context-specific effects and brings out how both paradigmatic and syntagmatic information shapes language processing.