This study explores the effect of collaborative writing (CW) and peer feedback (PF) practices on subsequent individual assignments. Two groups university students in a Spanish as foreign language course experienced both CW PF (Group 1 then PF; Group 2 CW), pre posttests were analyzed for syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, accuracy, fluency, well overall quality using an analytic scale. Re...

  This paper investigates the use of ‘lexical bundles’ in two broad corpora of journalistic writing. The aim of this study is to compare the use of lexical bundles in the two domains, one consisted of newspaper articles written in English and published in England and the other one comprised of newspaper articles written in Persian from Iranian publications. For this purpose, the frequency...

Finite state methods for natural language processing often require the construction and the intersection of several automata. In this paper we investigate the question of determining the best order in which these intersections should be performed. We take as an example lexical disambiguation in polarity grammars. We show that there is no efficient way to minimize the state complexity of these i...

In this squib, I argue that the child faces a severe computational complexity problem in parsing even simplest of trees: number possible trees consistent with UG grows exponentially as function lexical items. Economy conditions have result drastically decreasing task. also discuss relationship betwe...

Auditory and acoustic data are presented to document some tonologically challenging aspects of the seven tones of Wénchéng, a south-west Oujiang Wu dialect of Chinese. Tones are described both in isolation form and in selected lexical tone sandhi combinations. It is shown how the complexity of the tonal system results in clashes between tonological representation and phonetic reality.

We introduce two abstraction mechanisms for streamlining the process of semantic interpretation. Configurational descriptions of dependency graphs increase the linguistic generality of interpretation schemata, while interfacing them to lexical and conceptual inheritance hierarchies reduces the amount and complexity of semantic specifications.

Eye movements were recorded in a group of Down syndrome (DS) readers as they processed sentences of differing lexical and syntactic complexity. The pattern of eye movements during reading was in line with comprehension scores and moreover revealed differences in processing that comprehension scores alone did not. Future research in DS readers with this methodology is both warranted and encouraged.

The flow of natural language is often broken by constructions which are difficult to analyze with conventional linguistic parsers. To handle these constructions, which include numbers, dates, addresses, etc., and, to a lesser extent, proper nouns, NL systems typically implement specialized new rules. This leads to a level of complexity which renders maintenance or improvement difficult. Analyzi...

the most important and practical phase of analyzing the linguistic errors of second language learners is to find the solutions to decrease these errors. to that end, the present study examined translation strategy to decrease the number of grammatical and lexical errors of chinese language learners learning persian. twelve chinese language learners were asked to write a text in two stages. firs...

This article examines nonmathematical linguistic complexity as a source of differential item functioning (DIF) in math word problems for English language learners (ELLs). Specifically, this study investigates the relationship between item measures of linguistic complexity, nonlinguistic forms of representation and DIF measures based on item response theory difficulty parameters in a state fourt...