We explored the impact of a degraded semantic system on lexical, morphological and syntactic complexity in language production. We analysed transcripts from connected speech samples from eight patients with semantic dementia (SD) and eight age-matched healthy speakers. The frequency distributions of nouns and verbs were compared for hand-scored data and data extracted using text-analysis softwa...

We present a study that investigates that factors that determine what makes a good lexical substitution. We begin by observing that there is a correlation between the corpus frequency of words and the number of WordNet senses they have, and hypothesise that readers might prefer common, but more ambiguous words over less ambiguous but also less common ones. We identify four properties of a word ...

This study examines two possibilities of using the FLELex graded lexicon for the automated assessment of text complexity in French as a foreign language learning. From the lexical frequency distributions described in FLELex, we derive a single level of difficulty for each word in a parallel corpus of original and simplified texts. We then use this data to automatically address the lexical compl...

Studies of brain areas supporting deductive reasoning show inconsistent results, possibly because of the variety of tasks and baselines used. In two event-related functional magnetic imaging studies we employed a cognitive load paradigm to isolate the neural correlates of deductive reasoning and address the role (if any) of language in deduction. Healthy participants evaluated the logical statu...

This article reviews recent studies in which human judgements of essay quality are assessed using Coh-Metrix, an automated text analysis tool. The goal of these studies is to better understand the relationship between linguistic features of essays and human judgements of writing quality. Coh-Metrix reports on a wide range of linguistic features, affording analyses of writing at various levels o...

This narrative review discusses quantitative indices measuring differences between alphabetic languages that are related to the process of word recognition. The specific orthography that a child is acquiring has been identified as a central element influencing reading acquisition and dyslexia. However, the development of reliable metrics to measure differences between language scripts hasn't re...

Many existing approaches for measuring text complexity tend to overestimate the complexity levels of informational texts while simultaneously underestimating the complexity levels of literary texts. We present a two-stage estimation technique that successfully addresses this problem. At Stage 1, each text is classified into one or another of three possible genres: informational, literary or mix...

This paper reports the findings from a study that explored effects of task complexity on linguistic in EFL writing with within-and-between-subject design for sustainability skills. A total 178 English majors and non-English participated study. They each performed two tasks were manipulated using variables: number elements prior knowledge. Linguistic was measured both syntactic lexical aspects 3...

Sub-categorized arguments introduced by the French preposition pour has been under-studied in previous work, as can be seen from the incompleteness of existing lexical-syntactic resources in that regard. In this paper, we briefly introduce the various types of sub-categorization in pour, which are to be distinguished from occurrences of pour as a discourse connective. We describe how we added a...