Based on Robinson’s Cognition Hypothesis, this study explored the effects of task complexity on the lexical complexity of Iranian EFL students’ argumentative writing.This study was designed to explore the manipulation of cognitive task complexity along +/-single task dimension (a resource dispersing dimension in Robinson’s triadic framework) on Iranian EFL learners’ production in term of lexica...

: This study aims to explore the relationship between syntactic and lexical complexity and also the relationship between different aspects of lexical complexity. To this end, speech monologs of 35 Iranian high-intermediate learners of English on three different tasks (i.e. argumentation, description, and narration) were analyzed for correlations between one measure of sy...

This article reports on the findings of a study that investigated the impact of manipulating task performance conditions on listening task performance by learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). The study was designed to explore the effects of changing complexity dimensions on listening task performance and to achieve two aims: to see how listening comprehension task performance was aff...

Building on Robinson’s (2001, 2003) Cognition Hypothesis, Skehan’s (1998) Limited Attentional Capacity Model, and Kellog’s (1986) model of writing, this study examined the effect of task planning on the fluency, accuracy, and complexity of 60 Iranian EFL learners’ argumentative and narrative writings under different planning conditions. A quasi-experimental design with three levels of planning ...

Task difficulty across different macro-genres continues to remain among less attended areas in second language development studies. This study examined the correlation between task difficulty across the descriptive, narrative, argumentative, and expository macro-genres. The three components of task difficulty (i.e., code complexity, cognitive complexity, and communicative stress) were also comp...

This study aimed at examining the main and interaction effects of increased intentional reasoning demands, planning time, and also language learning aptitude on syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and fluency (CALF) of 226 EFL learners’ performance on letter writing tasks. The participants were first randomly assigned to three experimental groups to be given a task with differin...

Research evidence reported to date demonstrates the differential effects of manipulating second language (L2) task conditions on the resultant production as measured in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency. The present study was aimed at adding to the available body of findings by exploring the synergistic effects of two task condition variables, namely online planning and immediacy (± He...

Recently tasks, as the basic units of syllabi, and the cognitive complexity, as the criterion for sequencing them, have caught many second language researchers’ attention. This study sought to explore the effect of utilizing the cognitively simple and complex tasks on high- and low-proficient EFL Iranian writers’ linguistic performance, i.e., fluency, accuracy, lexical complexity, and structura...

Designing a task with a reasonable level of cognitive complexity has always been important for syllabus designers, teachers, as well as researchers. This is because task manipulation may lead to different results in oral production. The present study was an attempt to explore the effect of this  manipulation  -  based  on  Robinson’s  resource-directing  model  (reasoning  demands, number of el...

The  present  meta-analysis  was  conducted  to  provide  a  quantitative  measure  of  the overall effects of task complexity on Chinese EFL learners’ language  production.  Based  on  the strict inclusion criteria, 12 primary  studies  were synthesized according to key  features.  Eleven of them  were  meta-analyzed  to  investigate  effects  of  raising  the  resource-directing  task  comple...