Although core in the teaching of academic language skills, little research to date has investigated what makes video-recorded lectures difficult for learners. As part a larger program develop automated videotext complexity measures, this study reports on selected dimensions linguistic understand how they contribute overall difficulty. Based ratings English learners 320 video lectures, we built ...

In L2 development, the cognitive complexity of tasks plays a crucial role in task performance and language features produced. However, there have only been few studies addressing the impact of task complexity on EFL learners' attention to L2 system and form-focused self-repairs (FFS).This study explores the role of increasing cognitive task complexity in EFL learners' form-focused attention (FF...

In L2 development, the cognitive complexity of tasks plays a crucial role in task performance and language features produced. However, there have only been few studies addressing the impact of task complexity on EFL learners' attention to L2 system and form-focused self-repairs (FFS).This study explores the role of increasing cognitive task complexity in EFL learners' form-focused attention (FF...

We have become so used to viewing natural language in computational terms that we need occasionally to remind ourselves of the methodological commitment this view entails. That commitment is this: we assume that to understand linguistic tasks—tasks such as recognizing sentences, determining their structure, extracting their meaning, and manipulating the information they contain—is to discover t...

The notion of Kolmogorov complexity (=the minimal length of a program that generates some object) is often useful as a kind of language that allows us to reformulate some notions and therefore provide new intuition. In this survey we provide (with minimal comments) many different examples where notions and statements that involve Kolmogorov complexity are compared with their counterparts not in...

Natural languages vary widely in the degree to which they make use of hierarchical composition in their grammars, in particular, the degree to which syntactic versus morphological means of composition are utilized. Languages historically spoken in small communities develop much deeper levels of morphological embedding than those spoken by larger groups, an observation confirmed by a statistical...

PURPOSE To extend formal models of language learnability to applications in clinical treatment of children with functional phonological delays. METHOD The focus of the narrative review is on phonological complexity. This follows from learnability theory, whereby complexity in the linguistic input to children has been shown to trigger language learning. Drawing from the literature, phonologica...