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Modeling the impact of orthographic coding on Czech–Polish and Bulgarian–Russian reading intercomprehension

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2017

Irina Stenger ,
Klára Jágrová ,
Andrea Fischer ,
Tania Avgustinova ,
Dietrich Klakow  and
Roland Marti
Irina Stenger
Affiliation:
Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 1102: Information Density and Linguistic Encoding Project C4: INCOMSLAV Mutual Intelligibility and Surprisal in Slavic Intercomprehension Saarland University, Postfach 151150, 66041 Saarbrücken, Germany. ira.stenger@mx.uni-saarland.de, kjagrova@coli.uni-saarland.de, andrea.fischer@lsv.uni-saarland.de, avgustinova@coli.uni-saarland.de, dietrich.klakow@lsv.uni-saarland.de, rwmslav@mx.uni-saarland.de
Klára Jágrová
Affiliation:
Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 1102: Information Density and Linguistic Encoding Project C4: INCOMSLAV Mutual Intelligibility and Surprisal in Slavic Intercomprehension Saarland University, Postfach 151150, 66041 Saarbrücken, Germany. ira.stenger@mx.uni-saarland.de, kjagrova@coli.uni-saarland.de, andrea.fischer@lsv.uni-saarland.de, avgustinova@coli.uni-saarland.de, dietrich.klakow@lsv.uni-saarland.de, rwmslav@mx.uni-saarland.de
Andrea Fischer
Affiliation:
Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 1102: Information Density and Linguistic Encoding Project C4: INCOMSLAV Mutual Intelligibility and Surprisal in Slavic Intercomprehension Saarland University, Postfach 151150, 66041 Saarbrücken, Germany. ira.stenger@mx.uni-saarland.de, kjagrova@coli.uni-saarland.de, andrea.fischer@lsv.uni-saarland.de, avgustinova@coli.uni-saarland.de, dietrich.klakow@lsv.uni-saarland.de, rwmslav@mx.uni-saarland.de
Tania Avgustinova
Affiliation:
Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 1102: Information Density and Linguistic Encoding Project C4: INCOMSLAV Mutual Intelligibility and Surprisal in Slavic Intercomprehension Saarland University, Postfach 151150, 66041 Saarbrücken, Germany. ira.stenger@mx.uni-saarland.de, kjagrova@coli.uni-saarland.de, andrea.fischer@lsv.uni-saarland.de, avgustinova@coli.uni-saarland.de, dietrich.klakow@lsv.uni-saarland.de, rwmslav@mx.uni-saarland.de
Dietrich Klakow
Affiliation:
Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 1102: Information Density and Linguistic Encoding Project C4: INCOMSLAV Mutual Intelligibility and Surprisal in Slavic Intercomprehension Saarland University, Postfach 151150, 66041 Saarbrücken, Germany. ira.stenger@mx.uni-saarland.de, kjagrova@coli.uni-saarland.de, andrea.fischer@lsv.uni-saarland.de, avgustinova@coli.uni-saarland.de, dietrich.klakow@lsv.uni-saarland.de, rwmslav@mx.uni-saarland.de
Roland Marti
Affiliation:
Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 1102: Information Density and Linguistic Encoding Project C4: INCOMSLAV Mutual Intelligibility and Surprisal in Slavic Intercomprehension Saarland University, Postfach 151150, 66041 Saarbrücken, Germany. ira.stenger@mx.uni-saarland.de, kjagrova@coli.uni-saarland.de, andrea.fischer@lsv.uni-saarland.de, avgustinova@coli.uni-saarland.de, dietrich.klakow@lsv.uni-saarland.de, rwmslav@mx.uni-saarland.de
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Abstract

Focusing on orthography as a primary linguistic interface in every reading activity, the central research question we address here is how orthographic intelligibility can be measured and predicted between closely related languages. This paper presents methods and findings of modeling orthographic intelligibility in a reading intercomprehension scenario from the information-theoretic perspective. The focus of the study is on two Slavic language pairs: Czech–Polish (West Slavic, using the Latin script) and Bulgarian–Russian (South Slavic and East Slavic, respectively, using the Cyrillic script). In this article, we present computational methods for measuring orthographic distance and orthographic asymmetry by means of the Levenshtein algorithm, conditional entropy and adaptation surprisal method that are expected to predict the influence of orthography on mutual intelligibility in reading.

Keywords

entropyLevenshtein distancemutual intelligibilityreading intercomprehensionSlavic orthographic codesurprisal
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 40 , Special Issue 2: Receptive Multilingualism , October 2017 , pp. 175 - 199
Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2017 

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