A Comparative Study of Educational Texts for Native, Foreign, and Bilingual Young Speakers of Russian: Are Simplified Texts Equally Simple?

Anna Dmitrieva, Antonina Laposhina, Maria Lebedeva

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

Abstract

Studies on simple language and simplification are often based on datasets of texts, either for children or learners of a second language. In both cases, these texts represent an example of simple language, but simplification likely involves different strategies. As such, this data may not be entirely homogeneous in terms of text simplicity. This study investigates linguistic properties and specific simplification strategies used in Russian texts for primary school children with different language backgrounds and levels of language proficiency. To explore the structure and variability of simple texts for young readers of different age groups, we have trained models for multiclass and binary classification. The models were based on quantitative features of texts. Subsequently, we evaluated the simplification strategies applied to readers of the same age with different linguistic backgrounds. This study is particularly relevant for the Russian language material, where the concept of easy and plain language has not been sufficiently investigated. The study revealed that the three types of texts cannot easily be distinguished from each other by judging the performance of multiclass models based on various quantitative features. Therefore, it can be said that texts of all types exhibit a similar level of accessibility to young readers. In contrast, binary classification tasks demonstrated better results, especially in the R-native vs. non R-native track (with 0.78 F1-score), these results may indicate that the strategies used for adapting or creating texts for each type of audience are different.
Original languageEnglish
Article number703690
JournalFrontiers in Psychology
Volume12
Number of pages7
ISSN1664-1078
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 26 Oct 2021
MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

Fields of Science

  • PREDICTION
  • READABILITY
  • READING DIFFICULTY
  • Russian language
  • simple Russian
  • simple language
  • simplification strategies
  • text simplification
  • textbook analysis
  • textbook corpus
  • young readers
  • 6121 Languages

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