  Recently, large pre-trained language models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior
language understanding abilities, including zero-shot causal reasoning.
However, it is unclear to what extent their capabilities are similar to human
ones. We here study the processing of an event $B$ in a script-based story,
which causally depends on a previous event $A$. In our manipulation, event $A$
is stated, negated, or omitted in an earlier section of the text. We first
conducted a self-paced reading experiment, which showed that humans exhibit
significantly longer reading times when causal conflicts exist ($\neg A
\rightarrow B$) than under logical conditions ($A \rightarrow B$). However,
reading times remain similar when cause A is not explicitly mentioned,
indicating that humans can easily infer event B from their script knowledge. We
then tested a variety of LLMs on the same data to check to what extent the
models replicate human behavior. Our experiments show that 1) only recent LLMs,
like GPT-3 or Vicuna, correlate with human behavior in the $\neg A \rightarrow
B$ condition. 2) Despite this correlation, all models still fail to predict
that $nil \rightarrow B$ is less surprising than $\neg A \rightarrow B$,
indicating that LLMs still have difficulties integrating script knowledge. Our
code and collected data set are available at
https://github.com/tony-hong/causal-script.
