Article published in:
Recent Advances in Automatic Readability Assessment and Text Simplification
Edited by Thomas François and Delphine Bernhard
[ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics 165:2] 2014
► pp. 136–162

Readability for foreign language learning

The importance of cognates

In this paper, we analyse the differences between L1 acquisition and L2 learning and identify four main aspects: input quality and quantity, mapping processes, cross-lingual influence, and reading experience. As a consequence of these differences, we conclude that L1 readability measures cannot be directly mapped to L2 readability. We propose to calculate L2 readability for various dimensions and for smaller units. It is particularly important to account for the cross-lingual influence from the learner’s L1 and other previously acquired languages and for the learner’s higher experience in reading.In our analysis, we focus on lexical readability as it has been found to be the most influential dimension for L2 reading comprehension. We discuss the features frequency, lexical variation, concreteness, polysemy, and context specificity and analyse their impact on L2 readability. As a new feature specific to L2 readability, we propose the cognateness of words with words in languages the learner already knows. A pilot study confirms our assumption that learners can deduce the meaning of new words by their cognateness to other languages.
Keywords: cognates, readability measures, second language learning, language transfer
Published online: 23 January 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/itl.165.2.02bei
References
Adamson, G.W., & Boreham, J
(1974) The use of an association measure based on character structure to identify semantically related pairs of words and document titles. Information Storage and Retrieval, 10(7), 253–260. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Al-Khalifa, H.S., & Al-Ajlan, A
(2010) Automatic readability measurements of the arabic text: An exploratory study. The Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering, 35(2C).Google Scholar
Aluisio, S., Specia, L., Gasperin, C., & Scarton, C
(2010) Readability assessment for text simplification. Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Fifth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (pp. 1–9). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Anagnostou, N.K., & Weir, G.R.S
(2006) From corpus-based collocation frequencies to readability measure. ICT in the Analysis, Teaching and Learning of Languages (pp. 33–46).
Beinborn, L., Zesch, T., & Gurevych, I
(2012) Towards fine-grained readability measures for self-directed language learning. Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (Vol. 801, pp. 11–19). Linköping University Electronic Press, Linköping Universitet.
(2013) Cognate production using character-based machine translation. Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (pp. 883–891). Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing.
Benjamin, R.G
(2011) Reconstructing readability: Recent developments and recommendations in the analysis of text difficulty. Educational Psychology Review, 24(1), 63–88. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Brew, C., & McKelvie, D
(1996) Word-pair extraction for lexicography. Proceedings of the Second International Conference on new Methods in Language Processing (pp. 45–55).
Brown, J.D
(1998) An EFL readability index. JALT Journal, 20(2), 7–36.Google Scholar
Carrell, P.L
(1987) Readability in ESL. Reading in a Foreign Language, 4(1), 21–40.Google Scholar
Cenoz, J
(2003) The additive effect of bilingualism on third language acquisition: A review. International Journal of Bilingualism, 7(1), 71–87. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N
(1965) Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Coleman, M., & Liau, T
(1975) A computer readability formula designed for machine scoring. Journal of Applied Psychology, 60(2), 283–284. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Collins-Thompson, K., & Callan, J
(2005) Predicting reading difficulty with statistical language models. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 56(13), 1448–1462. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cook, V.J., Long, J., & McDonough, S
(1979) First and second language learning. In G.E. Perren (Ed.), The mother tongue and other languages in education (pp. 7–22). London: CILTRGoogle Scholar
Crystal, D
(2011) Dictionary of linguistics and phonetics (Vol. 301). John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Curran, J
(2010) Agatha Christie’s secret notebooks: Fifty years of mysteries in the making (pp. 496). US:HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Danielsson, P., & Mühlenbock, K
(2000) Small but efficient: The misconception of high- frequency words in Scandinavian translation. Envisioning Machine Translation in the Information Future Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 1934 (pp. 158–168). Crossref
De Groot, A.M.B., & Keijzer, R
(2000) What is hard to learn is easy to forget: The roles of word concreteness, cognate status, and word frequency in foreign-language vocabulary learning and forgetting. Language Learning, 50(1), 1–56. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
DeKeyser, R.M
(2009) Cognitive-psychological processes in second language learning. In M.H. Long & C.J. Doughty (Eds.), The handbook of language teaching (pp. 119–138). Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dell’Orletta, F., Montemagni, S., & Venturi, G
(2011) READ-IT: Assessing readability of Italian texts with a view to text simplification. Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (pp. 73–83).
DuBay, W.H
(2004) The principles of readability. Impact Information, 1–76.Google Scholar
Ellis, N
(1994) Consciousness in second language learning: Psychological perspectives on the role of conscious processes in vocabulary acquisition. AILA Review, 111.
Fellbaum, C
(1998) WordNet: An electronic database. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Feng, L., Elhadad, N., & Huenerfauth, M
(2009) Cognitively motivated features for readability assessment. Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 229–237). Morristown, NJ, USA, Association for Computational Linguistics.
Ferreira de Souza, V
(2003) The role of cognates in reading comprehension. repositorio.ufsc.br. Florianópolis, Brazil: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina.Google Scholar
Firth, J
(1957) A synopsis of linguistic theory, 1930–1955.Google Scholar
François, T., & Fairon, C
(2012) An “AI readability” formula for French as a foreign language. Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (pp. 466–477).
Gomes, L., & Pereira Lopes, J.G
(2011) Measuring spelling similarity for cognate identification. Progress in Artificial Intelligence, 624–633. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 7026. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Graesser, A.C., & McNamara, D
(2004) Coh-Metrix: Analysis of text on cohesion and language. Behavior Research Methods, 36(2).Google Scholar
Greenfield, J
(2004) Readability formulas for EFL. JALT Journal, 26(1), 5–24. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gunning, R
(1969) The fog index after twenty years. Journal of Business Communication, 6(2), 3–13. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Haastrup, K
(1991) Lexical inferencing procedures, or, talking about words: Receptive procedures in foreign language learning with special reference to English. Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag.Google Scholar
Hall, P.A.V., & Dowling, G.R
(1980) Approximate string matching. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 12(4), 381–402. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Heilman, M.J., Collins-Thompson, K., Callan, J., & Eskenazi, M
(2007) Combining lexical and grammatical features to improve readability measures for first and second language texts. Proceedings of NAACL-HLT (pp. 460–467).
Hoshino, N., & Kroll, J.F
(2008) Cognate effects in picture naming: Does cross-language activation survive a change of script? Cognition, 106(1), 501–11. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Inkpen, D., Frunza, O., & Kondrak, G
(2005) Automatic identification of cognates and false friends in French and English. Proceedings of the International Conference Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (pp. 251–257).
Jiang, N
(2000) Lexical representation and development in a second language. Applied Linguistics, 21(1), 47–77. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kaushanskaya, M., & Rechtzigel, K
(2012) Concreteness effects in bilingual and monolingual word learning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 19(5), 935–941. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kincaid, J.P., Fishburne Jr, R.P., Rogers, R.L., & Chissom, B.S
(1975) Derivation of New Readability Formulas (Automated Readability Index, Fog Count and Flesch Reading Ease Formula) for Navy Enlisted Personnel.. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kondrak, G
(2000) A new algorithm for the alignment of phonetic sequences. Proceedings of the 1st NAACL (pp. 288–295).
Kondrak, G., & Dorr, B
(2004) Identification of confusable drug names: A new approach and evaluation methodology. Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (pp. 952–958).
Kroll, J.F., & Stewart, E
(1994) Category interference in translation andpicture naming: Evidence for asymmetric connections between bilingual memory representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 331, 149–174. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Larsson, P
(2006) Classification into readability levels implementation and evaluation. Sweden: Uppsala University.Google Scholar
Laufer, B., & Ravenhorst-Kalovski, G.C
(2010) Lexical threshold revisited: Lexical text coverage, learners’ vocabulary size and reading comprehension, 22(1), 15–30.
Lemhöfer, K., & Dijkstra, T
(2008) Native language influences on word recognition in a second language: A megastudy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34(1), 12. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lervåg, A., & Aukrust, V.G
(2010) Vocabulary knowledge is a critical determinant of the difference in reading comprehension growth between first and second language learners. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and Allied Disciplines, 51(5), 612–20. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lin, D
(1998) Automatic retrieval and clustering of similar words. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on on Computational Linguistics (Vol. 21, pp. 768–774). Association for Computational Linguistics.
List, J.-M
(2012) LexStat: Automatic detection of cognates in multilingual wordlists. Proceedings of the EACL 2012 Joint Workshop of LINGVIS\UNCLH (pp. 117–125).
Lotto, L., & De Groot, A.M.B
(1998) Effects of learning method and word type on acquiring vocabulary in an unfamiliar language. Language Learning, 48(1), 31–69. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
McDonald, S., & Ramscar, M
(2001) Testing the distributional hypothesis: The influence of context on judgements of semantic similarity. Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 611–616).
McLaughlin, G.H
(1969) SMOG grading: A new readability formula. Journal of Reading, 12(8), 639–646.Google Scholar
Meara, P
(1988) Learning words in an L1 and an L2. Polyglot, 9(3), 1–11.Google Scholar
Melamed, I.D
(1999) Bitext maps and alignment via pattern recognition. Computational Linguistics, 25(1), 107–130.Google Scholar
Mitkov, R., Pekar, V., Blagoev, D., & Mulloni, A
(2008) Methods for extracting and classifying pairs of cognates and false friends. Machine Translation, 21(1), 29–53. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Montalvo, S., Pardo, E.G., Martinez, R., & Fresno, V
(2012) Automatic cognate identification based on a fuzzy combination of string similarity measures. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (pp. 1–8).
Mulloni, A., & Pekar, V
(2006) Automatic detection of orthographic cues for cognate recognition. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 2387–2390).
Nakov, S
(2009) Automatic identification of false friends in parallel corpora: Statistical and semantic approach, Serdica Journal of Computing, 3(2), 133–158.
Nation, P
(2003) The role of the first language in foreign language learning. Asian EFL Journal, 5(2), 1–8.Google Scholar
Odlin, T
(1989) Language transfer: Cross-linguistic influence in language learning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Paribakht, T., & Wesche, M
(1997) Vocabulary enhancement activities and reading for meaning in second language vocabulary acquisition. Second language vocabulary acquisition: A rationale for pedagogy, 174–200.Google Scholar
Pitler, E., & Nenkova, A
(2008) Revisiting readability: A unified framework for predicting text quality. Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 186–195). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Potter, M.C., So, K.-F., Eckardt, B. Von, & Feldman, L.B
(1984) Lexical and conceptual representation in beginning and proficient bilinguals. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 23(1), 23–38. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ringbom, H., & Jarvis, S
(2009) The importance of cross-linguistic similarity in foreign language learning. The Handbook of Language Teaching (pp. 106–118). CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sato, S., Matsuyoshi, S., & Kondoh, Y
(2008) Automatic assessment of Japanese text readability based on a textbook corpus. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) . Marrakech, Morocco.
Schmidt, R
(1995) Consciousness and foreign language learning: A tutorial on the role of attention and awareness in learning. Attention and Awareness in Foreign Language Learning, 1–63.Google Scholar
Schwarm, S.E., & Ostendorf, M
(2005) Reading level assessment using support vector machines and statistical language models. Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the ACL (pp. 523–530).
Sepúlveda Torres, L., & Aluisio, S.M
(2011) Using machine learning methods to avoid the pitfall of cognates and false friends in Spanish-Portuguese word pairs. Proceedings of the 8th Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology (pp. 67–76).
Sigurd, B., Eeg-Olofsson, M., & Van Weijer, J
(2004) Word length, sentence length and frequency - Zipf revisited. Studia Linguistica, 58(1), 37–52. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Simard, M., Foster, G.F., & Isabelle, P
(1992) Using cognates to align sentences in bilingual corpora (pp. 67–81).
Smith, E.A., & Senter, R.J
(1967) Automated readability index. Ohio: Cincinnati University.Google Scholar
Tharp, J.B
(1939) The measurement of vocabulary difficulty. The Modern Language Journal, 24(3), 169–187. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tonelli, S., Manh, K.T., & Pianta, E
(2012) Making readability indices readable. Proceedings of NAACL-HLT: Workshop on Predicting and Improving Text Readability for Target Reader Populations (pp. 40–48).
Uitdenbogerd, S
(2005) Readability of French as a foreign language and its uses. Proceedings of the Australian Document Computing Symposium (pp. 19–25).
Vajjala, S., & Meurers, D
(2012) On improving the accuracy of readability classification using insights from second language acquisition. Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA7) (pp. 163–173).
Verspoor, M., & Lowie, W
(2003) Making sense of polysemous words. Language Learning, 53(3), 547–586. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Volodina, E., & Pijetlovic, D
(2013) Towards a gold standard for Swedish CEFR-based ICALL. Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on NLP for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (pp. 48–65). Linköping University Electronic Press, Linköping Universitet.
Vor der Brück, T., Hartrumpf, S., & Helbig, H
(2008) A readability checker with supervised learning using deep syntactic and semantic indicators. Proceedings of the 11th International Multiconference: Information Society (pp. 92–97).
Vygotsky, L
(1978) Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Webb, S.A., & Chang, A.C.-S
(2012) Second language vocabulary growth. RELC Journal, 43(1), 113–126. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zesch, T., & Gurevych, I
(2010) Wisdom of crowds versus wisdom of linguists – measuring the semantic relatedness of words. Natural Language Engineering, 16(1), 25–59. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zhang, D., & Koda, K
(2011) Contribution of morphological awareness and lexical inferencing ability to L2 vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension among advanced EFL learners: testing direct and indirect effects. Reading and Writing, 25(5), 1195–1216. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zobel, J., & Dart, P
(1996) Phonetic string matching: lessons from information retrival. Proceedings of the 19th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (pp. 166–172).
Zobl, H
(1980) The formal and developmental selectivity of L1 influence on L2 acquisition. Language Learning, 30(1), 43–57. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Zhang, Haomin, Yuting Han, Xi Cheng, Jie Sun & Shoran Ohara
2021. Unpacking cross-linguistic similarities and differences in third language Japanese vocabulary acquisition among Chinese college students. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development ► pp. 1 ff. Crossref logo
Zhang, Haomin, Yuting Han, Xing Zhang & Liuran Cui
2022. Frequency, Dispersion and Abstractness in the Lexical Sophistication Analysis of A Learner-Based Word Bank: Dimensionality Reduction and Identification. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 29:2 ► pp. 195 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.