Predictability of Meaning in Written Speech: 'Cloze task' and 'Shannon's Guessing Game' as an Illustration

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2.3, Ruhr-University of Bochum, language: English, abstract: The term paper is to examine predictability in written speech based on two central experiments that underline the possibility of predicting answers and blank spaces. As examples arise Shannon's Guessing Game implemented by Claude Shannon in 1951 and Cloze Task by Taylor implemented in 1953. The tests are to show in how far grammatical and phonological structures of one's mother tongue as well as contextual information influence the choice of words in connected reading concerning phrases on one side and small texts as bigger units on the other side.