Intelligibility of Highly Predictable Polish Target Words in Sentences Presented to Czech Readers

Abstract

AbstractThis contribution analyses the role of sentential context in reading intercomprehension both from an information-theoretic and an error-analytical perspective. The assumption is that not only cross-lingual similarity can influence the successful word disambiguation in an unknown but related foreign language, but also that predictability in context contributes to better intelligibility of the target items. Experimental data were gathered for 149 Polish sentences [1] with highly predictable target words in sentence final position presented to Czech readers in a web-based cloze translation task. Psycholinguistic research showed that predictably of words in context correlates with cognitive effort to process the information provided by the word and its surprisal [3]. Our hypothesis is that intelligibility of highly predictable words in sentential context of a related language also correlates with surprisal values obtained from statistical trigram language models. In order to establish a baseline, the individual words were also presented to Czech readers in a context-free translation experiment [4]. For the majority of the target words, an increase in correct translations is observable in context, as opposed to the results obtained without context. The overall correlations with surprisal are low, the highest being the joint surprisal of the Polish stimulus sentence. The error-analysis shows systematic patterns that are at least equally important intercomprehension factors, such as linguistic distance or morphological mismatches.KeywordsSlavic receptive multilingualismCzechPolishStatistical language modelingContext in intercomprehensionReadingSurprisalLinguistic distance