Xue, Wei; Steuer, Julius; Klakow, Dietrich; Möbius, Bernd
The role of surprisal and entropy in spoken intercomprehension: An experiment on translation of cognates with varied predictability
ITG Conference on Speech Communication, pp. 21-25, Berlin, Germany, 2025.
Word predictability affects comprehension and speech perception, yet its role in intercomprehension – understanding foreign languages without prior learning – remains understudied. While surprisal and entropy, derived from language models (LMs), capture different aspects of predictability, this study aims to explore how these estimates explain intercomprehension success. We asked German and English native speakers to translate Dutch cognates from spoken utterances with varied predictability. We extracted the estimates from cascade Automatic Speech Recognition with LM and LM-only approaches. Results revealed that both approaches explained translation accuracy to a similar extent, but only LM-only estimates were significant. Also, German speakers seem to leverage contextual information as in native comprehension, while English speakers do not. These findings highlight that beyond LM-based estimates, typological proximity shapes intercomprehension in varied predictability contexts.