This paper reports on a corpus-based comparison of syntactic complexity in NNS and NS university students’ writing. We analysed 600 essays from the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays using 10 syntactic complexity measures to investigate whether and the extent to which NNS and NS university students’ writing differs with respect to length o...

The necessary and sucient conditions for an automaton to be locally threshold testable are found. We introduce the polynomial time algorithm to verify local threshold testability of the automaton of time complexity O(n 5) and an algorithm of order O(n 3) for the local threshold testability problem for syntactic semigroup of the automaton. We modify necessary and sucient conditions for piecewise...

Any mapping S : C → K, where K is a field and C = (C,Σ) is a Σ-algebra, is called a KC-series. These series are natural generalizations of both formal series on strings over a field and the tree series introduced by Berstel and Reutenauer [1]. We consider various operations on KC-series and their effects on the linear extensions of the series. We also study some algebraic aspects of theKΣ-algeb...

This paper provides an algebraic characterization of the Strictly Piecewise class of languages studied by Rogers et al. 2010. These language are a natural subclass of the Piecewise Testable languages (Simon 1975) and are relevant to natural language. The algebraic characterization highlights a similarity between the Strictly Piecewise and Strictly Local languages, and also leads to a procedure ...

We present a simple computational approach to assigning a measure of complexity and information/entropy to families of natural languages, based on syntactic parameters and the theory of error correcting codes. We associate to each language a binary string of syntactic parameters and to a language family a binary code, with code words the binary string associated to each language. We then evalua...

Text simplification is the process of reducing the lexical and syntactic complexity of a text while attempting to preserve (most of) its information content. It has recently emerged as an important research area, which holds promise for enhancing the text readability for the benefit of a broader audience as well as for increasing the performance of other applications. Our work focuses on syntac...

We relate two measures of complexity of regular languages. The first is syntactic complexity, that is, the cardinality of the syntactic semigroup of the language. That semigroup is isomorphic to the semigroup of transformations of states induced by non-empty words in the minimal deterministic finite automaton accepting the language. If the language has n left quotients (its minimal automaton ha...

This study focuses on the analysis of linguistic complexity in professional academic writing light empirical evidence provided by a 1,597,000-word corpus ‘hard’ (life and physical sciences) ‘soft’ (arts social) scientific research articles published leading peer-review journals. Specifically, this investigation aims both to describe features texts written authors test hypothesis that varies acr...

This study investigates prosodic planning in a reading task in German. We analyse how the utterance length and syntactic complexity of an upcoming sentence affect two acoustic parameters (pause duration and the initial fundamental frequency peak) and two respiratory parameters (inhalation depth and inhalation duration). Two experiments were carried out. In the first experiment, data for twelve ...

The roles and effects of changes in syntax on comprehension and processing effort, and the relationships between these two, comprise a large and separate field of inquiry, with the general belief now in place that such changes and variations bring about varied psycholinguistic and discursive implications for comprehension, manifesting themselves differently in different genres.The current study...