This paper investigates the effect of sentence complexity, specifically
lexical and syntactic surprisal, on L2 listening difficulty.
Psycholinguistic studies revealed that surprisal cases correlate with
textual comprehension difficulty. Based on surprisal theory, these cases are
less probable or expected, considering the precedent context, thus require
more complex processing to comprehend. Little is known about the influence
of the surprisal factor on L2 listening comprehension. We aim to examine
this effect and propose to include these cases in captioning to assist L2
listeners. Since conventional captions include the whole transcript, we use
Partial and Synchronized Caption (PSC) with limited textual clues, which
allows for highlighting surprisal cases to reduce ambiguity. In our
experiment, intermediate learners of English (undergraduates) were asked to
transcribe and paraphrase videos containing surprisal cases. Results
revealed that learners faced difficulty when encountering surprisal, which
was partially addressed with the help of PSC, yet more assistance was
required.
Quantification of textual comprehension difficulty with an information theory-based algorithm
