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...

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...

The lexical component of a human language is typically heterogeneous and extremely complex. Before we can come to grips with the underlying lexical organization, we must reduce the bewildering complexity. Methods must be elaborated by which the interrelations between the units of the lexicon can be elucidated. This paper describes how a Swedish lexical material stored in a computer has been sem...

Most intelligibility tests are based on the use of monosyllabic test stimuli. This constraint eliminates the ability to measure the effects of lexical stress patterns, complex phonotactic organizations, and morphological complexity on intelligibility. Since these aspects of lexical structure affect speech production (e.g., by changing syllable duration), it is likely that they affect the struct...

The increasing complexity of legal systems has many origins, which are worth a deeper analysis. This paper is an attempt to unveil the complexity in legal texts driven by structural, lexical and syntactical properties. Thereby we transferred established quantitative methods from structural network analysis and linguistics into the domain of legal text analysis. Based on 3 553 German laws, respe...

An important goal of modern linguistic theory is to characterize as narrowly as possible the class of natural languages. One classical approach to this characterization has been to investigate the generative capacity of grammatical systems specifiable within particular linguistic theories. Formal results along these lines have already been obtained for certain kinds of Transformational Generat ...