Numerous analyses of reading time (RT) data have been implemented -- all in an effort to better understand the cognitive processes driving reading comprehension. However, data measured on words at the end of a sentence -- or even at the end of a clause -- is often omitted due to the confounding factors introduced by so-called "wrap-up effects," which manifests as a skewed distribution of RTs for these words. Consequently, the understanding of the cognitive processes that might be involved in these wrap-up effects is limited. In this work, we attempt to learn more about these processes by examining the relationship between wrap-up effects and information-theoretic quantities, such as word and context surprisals. We find that the distribution of information in prior contexts is often predictive of sentence- and clause-final RTs (while not of sentence-medial RTs). This lends support to several prior hypotheses about the processes involved in wrap-up effects.

翻译：大量阅读时间数据分析已被实施——所有努力均旨在更深入地理解驱动阅读理解的认知过程。然而，由于所谓的"结尾效应"引入的混杂因素（表现为这些词阅读时间的偏态分布），句子末尾甚至从句末尾词汇的测量数据常被省略。因此，对可能涉及这些结尾效应的认知过程的理解十分有限。本研究尝试通过考察结尾效应与信息论量（如词和语境惊讶度）之间的关系，进一步揭示这些过程。我们发现，先前语境中的信息分布通常能预测句末和从句末阅读时间（但对句中阅读时间无预测作用）。这为关于结尾效应所涉及过程的若干先前假设提供了支持。