Co-text and receptive multilingualism ‒ Finnish students comprehending Estonian

Muikku-Werner, Pirkko

doi:10.12697/jeful.2014.5.3.05

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 2 publications

(4 reference statements)

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“…Only 1 BG stimulus ръка [rəˈka] was much better understood by RU subjects in auditory perception as рука [rʊˈka] 'hand, arm' (100% intelligibly vs. 5%). It is remarkable that the most frequent incorrect answer in the written word translation task was the RU word река 'river' which can be considered an orthographic neighbor to the BG stimulus and to the RU cognate word 11 . Furthermore, 4 spoken BG stimuli were in the middle group and 57 spoken BG words fell into the low-percentage group of differences with regard to intelligibility.…”

Section: Results Of Intercomprehension Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual vs. Auditory Perception of Bulgarian Stimuli by Russian Native Speakers

Stenger¹,

Avgustinova²

2020

Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies

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This study contributes to a better understanding of receptive multilingualism by determining similarities and differences in successful processing of written and spoken cognate words in an unknown but (closely) related language. We investigate two Slavic languages with regard to their mutual intelligibility. The current focus is on the recognition of isolated Bulgarian words by Russian native speakers in a cognate guessing task, considering both written and audio stimuli. The experimentally obtained intercomprehension scores show a generally high degree of intelligibility of Bulgarian cognates to Russian subjects, as well as processing difficulties in case of visual vs. auditory perception. In search of an explanation, we examine the linguistic factors that can contribute to various degrees of written and spoken word intelligibility. The intercomprehension scores obtained in the online word translation experiments are correlated with (i) the identical and mismatched correspondences on the orthographic and phonetic level, (ii) the word length of the stimuli, and (iii) the frequency of Russian cognates. Additionally we validate two measuring methods: the Levenshtein distance and the word adaptation surprisal as potential pr

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Section: Results Of Intercomprehension Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual vs. Auditory Perception of Bulgarian Stimuli by Russian Native Speakers

Stenger¹,

Avgustinova²

2020

Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies

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“…The aims of the present article were based on previous research on reading comprehension (see Section 2.2 above) and earlier findings of RM between Estonian and Finnish (Muikku-Werner 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016). Three hypotheses can be presented as a background for research questions.…”

Section: Aims and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lexical inferencing and the mutual intelligibility of Estonian and Finnish

Muikku-Werner

2017

Nord J Linguist

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Several factors affect the comprehension of a text written in a language related to the reader's first language (L1): (i) orthographic similarity with the reader's L1, (ii) contextual clues, (iii) semantic relationships between components of phraseological units, and (iv) L1 reading comprehension strategies. This article compares the results of a cloze test (CT), in which a group of Finns read a text in their L1 (Finnish) and filled the gaps, and a translation test (TT), in which another group of Finns translated the Estonian version of the same text into Finnish. This text included five pairs of primes and targets, parts of the same phraseological unit, representing different semantic relations; in the CT the target was replaced by a gap and in the TT the respondents had to translate the target. The results indicated that the respondents used similar inferencing strategies in both tests, and thus provide evidence for the assumption that orthographic similarity is not the sole factor contributing to understanding a foreign text, but that L1 reading comprehension strategies are also employed.

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“…So far there have been only a few studies focusing on the role of context as an additional factor influencing the mutual intelligibility of target words. Muikku-Werner ( 2014 ) observed that the role of neighborhood density (number of available similar word forms that readers might consider suitable translation equivalents) decreases through context since the potential other options have to fit the syntactic frame. She also found that it appears easier for respondents to guess a frequent collocate of a word, once the other word is successfully recognized (Muikku-Werner, 2014 , p. 105).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Muikku-Werner ( 2014 ) observed that the role of neighborhood density (number of available similar word forms that readers might consider suitable translation equivalents) decreases through context since the potential other options have to fit the syntactic frame. She also found that it appears easier for respondents to guess a frequent collocate of a word, once the other word is successfully recognized (Muikku-Werner, 2014 , p. 105). In a study on the disambiguation of false friends with students of Slavic languages, Heinz ( 2009 ) points out that the amount of correctly understood context is crucial for the correct recognition of target words.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Correlation of Context-Aware Language Models With the Intelligibility of Polish Target Words to Czech Readers

et al. 2021

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This contribution seeks to provide a rational probabilistic explanation for the intelligibility of words in a genetically related language that is unknown to the reader, a phenomenon referred to as intercomprehension. In this research domain, linguistic distance, among other factors, was proved to correlate well with the mutual intelligibility of individual words. However, the role of context for the intelligibility of target words in sentences was subject to very few studies. To address this, we analyze data from web-based experiments in which Czech (CS) respondents were asked to translate highly predictable target words at the final position of Polish sentences. We compare correlations of target word intelligibility with data from 3-g language models (LMs) to their correlations with data obtained from context-aware LMs. More specifically, we evaluate two context-aware LM architectures: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTMs) that can, theoretically, take infinitely long-distance dependencies into account and Transformer-based LMs which can access the whole input sequence at the same time. We investigate how their use of context affects surprisal and its correlation with intelligibility.

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Co-text and receptive multilingualism ‒ Finnish students comprehending Estonian

Cited by 7 publications

References 2 publications

Visual vs. Auditory Perception of Bulgarian Stimuli by Russian Native Speakers

Visual vs. Auditory Perception of Bulgarian Stimuli by Russian Native Speakers

Lexical inferencing and the mutual intelligibility of Estonian and Finnish

On the Correlation of Context-Aware Language Models With the Intelligibility of Polish Target Words to Czech Readers

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