Text comprehension in English as a foreign language based on the sentence connectivity: A comparison of causal and semantic relatedness
| Project/Area Number |
15H06571
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Research Activity Start-up
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Research Field |
Foreign language education
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| Research Institution | Kyoei University |
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Principal Investigator |
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| Project Period (FY) |
2015-08-28 – 2017-03-31
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| Project Status |
Completed (Fiscal Year 2016)
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| Budget Amount *help |
¥2,600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,000,000、Indirect Cost: ¥600,000)
Fiscal Year 2016: ¥1,170,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000、Indirect Cost: ¥270,000)
Fiscal Year 2015: ¥1,430,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000、Indirect Cost: ¥330,000)
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| Keywords | 英語教育 / リーディング / 文章理解 / 心理言語学 / 潜在意味解析 / 記憶 / 言語処理 / 物語文 / 外国語教育 / 一貫性 |
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| Outline of Final Research Achievements |
This study aims to investigate how Japanese learners of English comprehend a passage based on the causal and semantic relatedness of the sentences. Causal relatedness refers to cause-and-effect relations between the events described in the sentences. Semantic relatedness refers to similarity of meaning conveyed by the sentences, which is assessed by a computational and corpus-based approach called latent semantic analysis. In the experiments, Japanese university students read two-sentence texts with varying causal and semantic relatedness. They were asked to judge the coherence of each text while reading, and then they were instructed to recall the text after reading. The results indicated that the texts were judged as more coherent and better remembered when the sentences were more causally and semantically related. However, these effects were likely to vary according to learners’ reading proficiency levels.
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Report
(3 results)
Research Products
(6 results)
