Abstract The study compared the syntactic complexity and use of logical connectors in summaries written French by two groups students: speakers as first language (L1) peers a French-immersion program (L2) from grade nine to university. Both L1 L2 university students demonstrated more general their than less mature writers. However, phrasal elaboration was apparent just at upper secondary levels...

The present study investigated the potential of writing in English as a foreign language (EFL) for learning by manipulating cognitive task complexity based on related models and hypotheses. essays written 59 Chinese postgraduate EFL students from different subject areas were analysed with reference to complexity, accuracy, fluency (CAF). Results showed that had no significant effect learners’ l...

We consider the diagnostic utility of various syntactic complexity measures when extracted from spoken language samples of healthy and cognitively impaired subjects. We examine measures calculated from manually built parse trees, as well as the same measures calculated from automatic parses. We show statistically significant differences between clinical subject groups for a number of syntactic ...

We solve an open problem concerning syntactic complexity: We prove that the cardinality of the syntactic semigroup of a suffix-free language with n left quotients (that is, with state complexity n) is at most (n − 1) + n − 2 for n > 6. Since this bound is known to be reachable, this settles the problem. We also reduce the alphabet of the witness languages reaching this bound to five letters ins...

Designing measures that capture various aspects of language ability is a central task in the design of systems for automatic scoring of spontaneous speech. In this study, we address a key aspect of language proficiency assessment – syntactic complexity. We propose a novel measure of syntactic complexity for spontaneous speech that shows optimum empirical performance on real world data in multip...

In this paper, we identify syntactic lexical ambiguity and sentence complexity as factors that contribute to parsing complexity in fully lexicalized grammar formalisms such as Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars. We also report on experiments that explore the effects of these factors on parsing complexity. We discuss how these constraints can be exploited in improving efficiency of parsers for ...

The complexity of sentences characteristic to biomedical articles poses a challenge to natural language parsers, which are typically trained on large-scale corpora of non-technical text. We propose a text simplification process, bioSimplify, that seeks to reduce the complexity of sentences in biomedical abstracts in order to improve the performance of syntactic parsers on the processed sentence...