The grip of grammar on meaning uncertainty: cross-linguistic evidence, neural correlates, and clinical relevance

ArXi:2605.01537v1 Announce Type: new Isolated word meanings are inherently uncertain. This uncertainty reduces when they are combined and anchored in context. We propose that grammar compresses meaning uncertainty cross-linguistically, which is reflected in brain and selectively disrupted in disorders. Compression was operationalized as the relative difference between non-contextual surprisal estimated from lexical frequency, and contextual surprisal from grammar-sensitive models. In narratives from 20 languages, contextual surprisal reduced frequency-based surprisal.