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arXiv · 2610.18439

Estimating Surprisal from the Speech Signal

Zachary Hopton·Samuel Kiegeland·Francesco Ignazio Re·Patrick Haller·Matthew B. Winn·Ryan Cotterell·Eleanor Chodroff
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Abstract

Although language is predominantly spoken, empirical tests of surprisal theory rely almost entirely on written text. In practice, surprisal is estimated using language models (LMs) trained on text and applied to transcriptions, creating a text bottleneck that limits evaluation of the theory in the spoken modality. We remove this bottleneck by estimating surprisal directly from the speech signal using a speech LM. This raises a key question: should surprisal be defined over realization-specific acoustic inputs or over abstract linguistic units? Since a single unit can have many distinct acoustic realizations, each assigned a different probability by the model, defining surprisal over abstract units is difficult. To address this, we introduce an importance sampling estimator that approximates the probability of an abstract unit by marginalizing over realizations generated by a text-to-speech model. Using pupillometry data from a listening study, we evaluate surprisal theory in this text-free setting at multiple levels of granularity. Obtaining surprisal from several speech LMs, we consistently find that surprisal estimated via importance sampling better predicts pupil dilation than realization-specific surprisal for words. We also find that surprisal values for sub-lexical units are predictive of pupil dilation. While we find that surprisal can be estimated without recourse to text, and that marginalizing over distinct realizations of words is more predictive of lexical processing effort, surprisal as a whole is not a strong predictor of change in pupil size, regardless of its source.

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Zachary Hopton, Samuel Kiegeland, Francesco Ignazio Re, Patrick Haller, Matthew B. Winn, Ryan Cotterell, Eleanor Chodroff. 2026-10-13. Estimating Surprisal from the Speech Signal. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18439

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