The longitudinal effects of repeating a timed classroom writing activity on the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) student’s L2 (second language) writing development were investigated. Data for 46 students were collected 30 times over one year. The students’ compositions were analyzed for fluency and for grammatical and lexical complexity. Text analysis using Coh Metrix and visual analysis of ...

Children with SLI generally exhibit poor sentence comprehension skills. We examined the specific impact of grammatical complexity and lexical frequency on comprehension performance, yielding contrasting results. The present study sheds new light on sentence comprehension in children with SLI by investigating a linguistic factor which has attracted little research interest: the impact of the lex...

In the context of language processing, the N280 is an anterior negative event-related potential profile associated with the lexical categorization of grammatical function words versus content words. Subsequent studies suggested that this effect was related to word statistics including length and frequency in the lexicon. The current research tests the hypothesis that the N280 effect is related ...

Currently, the majority of investigations of linguistic manifestations of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease are conducted based on manual linguistic analysis. Grammatical complexity is one of the language use characteristics sensitive to the effects of Alzheimer's disease and is difficult to operationalize and measure using manual approaches. In the current study, we demon...

The complexity of different components of the grammars of human languages can be quantified. For example, languages vary greatly in the size of their phonological inventories, and in the degree to which they make use of inflectional morphology. Recent studies have shown that there are relationships between these types of grammatical complexity and the number of speakers a language has. Language...

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the validity of measuring grammatical diversity with a specifically designed Lexical Diversity Assessment Tool (LDAT). A secondary objective is to use LDAT to determine if the level of difficulty assigned to English as a Second Language (ESL) texts corresponds to increases in grammatical, lexical, and temporal diversity. Other methods of lexical diversit...

This study was an attempt to investigate the developmental rate of fluency, accuracy and complexity among 12 EFL learners within the framework of chaos complexity theory. To carry out this study, 6 female and 6 male participants in two levels of proficiency (pre-and upper-intermediate) were put in two classes taught by the same teacher and following the same course. Every two months (for a peri...

This study examined how school-aged children process different grammatical categories. Event-related brain potentials elicited by words in visually presented sentences were analyzed according to seven grammatical categories with naturally varying characteristics of linguistic functions, semantic features, and quantitative attributes of length and frequency. The categories included nouns, adject...

This paper revisits a problem of the evaluation of computational grammatical inference (GI) systems and discusses what role complexity measures can play for the assessment of GI. We provide a motivation for using the Rademacher complexity and give an example showing how this complexity measure can be used in practice.

Researchers have extensively compared different L2 learning contexts, such as EFL versus study-abroad, for their impacts on oral production; however, scant attention, if any, has been paid to comparing EFL settings in terms of input factors such as textbooks, amount of contacts in L2, and teachers. Accordingly, the effects of these factors on the oral production skills were investigated in this...