# We resolve word ambiguities at the end of sentences When we read, **we tend to spend more time lingering on the last words of a sentence**. Those occurrences are known as wrap-up effects and it is still unclear what causes them. Meister et al.[^1] show that incorporating the information content of sentence-final words in a regression model improves the prediction of their reading times, and significantly more so than for sentence-medial words. **This suggests that this extra time is spent resolving prior ambiguities**, and underlines the different cognitive processes involved in the comprehension of sentence-medial and sentence-final words. If I understand correctly, this means that **==we spend more time looking at the end of sentences because we resolve the postponed word ambiguities that we encountered while reading it==**. If we found a duck that seemed irrelevant to the sentence, we keep on reading in the hope that the whole sentence will make it clearer. In the previous sentence, I replaced "word" with "duck", and it is probable that you stopped a bit longer at "clearer", or right here. --- ## 📚 References [^1]: Meister, Clara, et al. [Analyzing Wrap-Up Effects through an Information-Theoretic Lens](https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2203.17213). arXiv:2203.17213, arXiv, 31 Mar. 2022. arXiv.org.