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 paper addresses the grammatical challenges associated with development of clause complexity, focusing on performance a group monolingual Spanish-speaking schoolchildren Specific Language Impairment/Developmental Disorder (SLI/DLD) in longitudinal corpus oral narrative samples. The study examines presence interclause relations subordination and equivalence (hypotaxis parataxis) language sam...

We present a new characteristic of a regular ideal language called reset complexity. We find some bounds on the reset complexity in terms of the state complexity of a given language. We also compare the reset complexity and the state complexity for languages related to slowly synchronizing automata and study uniqueness question for automata yielding the minimum of reset complexity.

Cognitive linguistics gives the most inclusive, consistent description of how language is organized, used and learned to date. Cognitive linguistics contains a great number of concepts that are useful to second language learners.  If-clauses in English, on the other hand, remain intriguing for foreign language learners to struggle with, due to their intrinsic intricacies. EFL grammar books are ...

The present study investigated the effects of cognitive complexity of pedagogical tasks on the learners’ uptake of salient features in the input. For the purpose of data collection, three versions of a decision-making task (simple, mid, and complex) were employed. Three intact classes (each 20 language learners) were randomly assigned to three groups.  Each group transacted a version of a decis...

This quasi-experimental study aimed to investigate the effect of task repetition under four conditions on the three dimensions of oral production (accuracy, complexity and fluency) and grammatical knowledge gain of learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). 40 young learners of English as a Foreign Language in four classes were randomly assigned into one of the following groups: repetitio...

We initiate a complexity theoretic study of the language based graph reachability problem (L–Reach) : Fix a language L. Given a graph whose edges are labelled with alphabet symbols of the language L and two special vertices s and t, test if there is path P from s to t in the graph such that the concatenation of the symbols seen from s to t in the path P forms a string in the language L. We stud...

Automatic Language Identification is the process of classifying an utterance as belonging to one of a number of previously encountered languages. The field has been very active during the last couple of years and has progressed rapidly. We compare two approaches to the problem. The first approach, using hand-labelled speech data has previously been shown to yield better results, but at the pric...

This paper reviews the processes involved in Natural Language Processing (NLP). It then demonstrates the various kinds of choices that need be taken during the execution of the word morphology, the syntactic text analysis, or text generation components. It compares the time complexity of traditional serial algorithms and examines the possible expected gain in some corresponding parallel counter...