Ryzhova, Margarita; Ellsiepen, Emilia; Trinley, Katharina; Skrjanec, Iza; Demberg, Vera
The Effects of Linguistic Context on Comprehension of Unknown Words
The 2nd Workshop on Eye Movements and the Assessment of Reading Comprehension (MultiplEYE), 2024.
Words that are unfamiliar to us can elicit processing difficulties. Word familiarity can be modulated by the intrinsic properties of the word like frequency and length (Rayner, 1998, Kliegl et al. 2004). However, the literature shows that the context also affects comprehension (Nieuwland & van Berkum 2006; Lowell & Morris, 2014; Williams & Morris, 2004). For example, scientific or technical texts may contain more specialized vocabulary that is unfamiliar to the general reader, while everyday texts such as newspapers or novels may contain more familiar language. In such common contexts, the reader can be surprised to encounter an unknown word, or attribute it to a typo, while in a more scientific context, the reader might expect to encounter special domain terms that they don’t know.
In our study on processing unknown words in German, we manipulate the type of context to explore whether it affects the reader’s sensitivity to processing unfamiliar words. We conduct a self-paced reading experiment and ask participants to read texts for comprehension. Each text includes a target word: either a real word or a pseudoword. The target words were embedded into two types of context: everyday and scientific, making this study follow a 2×2 design. Everyday stories concern familiar events from daily life (e.g. children playing in a park), while scientific stories take place in less common settings with characters with a specialized profession (e.g. researchers conducting experiments in a laboratory). The scientific stories themselves are not expository texts, but rather narratives describing a less familiar scenario.
We find that in both contexts subjects showed sensitivity to pseudowords, resulting in higher reading times. However, this effect was significantly stronger in the everyday context, compared to the scientific context condition. The context alone didn’t affect the reading times. Our results show that unknown words, despite lacking defined meaning, are more anticipated in domain-specific texts than in general narratives. The scientific context increases the expectancy of encountering unknown words, resulting in faster reading.
In the time of abstract submission, we are conducting an eye-tracking counterpart of this study, additionally collecting information on language experience and domain expertise.