Stenger, Irina; Avgustinova, Tania
On Slavic cognate recognition in context
P. Selegej, Vladimir et al. (Ed.): Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies: Papers from the Annual International Conference ‘Dialogue’, pp. 660-668, Moscow, Russia, 2021.
This study contributes to a better understanding of reading intercomprehension as manifested in the intelligibility of East and South Slavic languages to Russian native speakers in contextualized cognate recognition experiments using Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Bulgarian stimuli. While the results mostly confirm the expected mutual intelligibility effects, we also register apparent processing difficulties in some of the cases. In search of an explanation, we examine the correlation of the experimentally obtained intercomprehension scores with various linguistic factors, which contribute to cognate intelligibility in a context, considering common predictors of intercomprehension associated with (i) morphology and orthography, (ii) lexis, and (iii) syntax.