How Word Order Affects Sentence Comprehension in Bangla: A Computational Approach to Simple Sentence

Abstract

Sentence comprehension is an integral and important part of whole text comprehension. It involves complex cognitive actions, as a reader has to work through lexical, syntactic and semantic aspects in order to understand a sentence. One of the vital features of a sentence is word order or surface forms. Different languages have evolved different systems of word orders, which reflect the cognitive structure of the native users of that language. Therefore, word order affects the cognitive load exerted by a sentence as experienced by the reader. Computational modeling approach to quantify the effect of word order on difficulty of sentence understanding can provide a great advantage in study of text readability and its applications. Handful of works has done in English and other languages to address the issue. Bangla, which is the fifth mostly spoken languages in the world and a relatively free word order language, still does not have any computational model to quantify the reading difficulty of a sentence. In this paper, we have developed models to predict the comprehending difficulty of a simple sentence according to its different surface forms in Bangla. In the course of action, we have also established that difficulty measures for English do not hold in Bangla. Our model has been validated against an extensive user survey.