Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.22210/strjez/51-2/5
The influence of semantic alignment on reading and listening text comprehension
Lukas Paun
orcid.org/0000-0002-5747-9660
; OŠ Julija Kempfa, Požega
Abstract
Textbooks are often the only source of German as a foreign language at school. This paper
examines whether increased semantic alignment of words in reading and listening comprehension
texts influences better comprehension in primary school students who have studied
German as a foreign language for four years, and what impact this acquired knowledge may
have on textbook composition. Therefore, students’ performance in reading and listening
tasks based on a fourth-year textbook was compared with their performance in reading and
listening tasks on experimental texts created with a distributional semantic model using the
German and Croatian subtitle corpus of TV series and films. Words from the control text
and the experimental text had the same frequency, but differed in semantic alignment in the
semantic space. The experimental texts are more semantically aligned than the control texts.
The comprehension of the individual texts was assessed with tasks that followed the texts.
The initial hypothesis was that students would perform better on reading and listening tasks
related to experimental texts than on those related to the control texts. The analysis of the
completed tasks confirmed the initial hypothesis.
Keywords
distributional semantic models, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, semantic alignment
Hrčak ID:
289482
URI
Publication date:
20.12.2022.
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