In the experiment reported here, approximately 1,000 words were presented to 75 participants in a go/no-go lexical decision task while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Partial correlations were computed for variables selected to reflect orthographic, lexical, and semantic processing, as well as for a novel measure of the visual complexity of written words. Correlations were based ...

Analysing lexical complexity is a task that has mainly attracted the attention of psycholinguists and language teachers. More recently, this issue has seen a growing interest in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and, in particular, that of automatic text simplification. The aim of this task is to identify words and structures which may be difficult to understand by a target audienc...

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) consistently show poor nonword repetition (NWR) performance. However, the reason for these difficulties remains a matter of intensive debate. Nonword repetition is a complex psycholinguistic task that heavily relies upon phonological segmentation and phonological knowledge, and even lexical knowledge. This study aims at investigating various ling...

This paper introduces Japanese lexical simplification. Japanese lexical simplification is the task of replacing complex words in a given sentence with simple words to produce a new sentence without changing the original meaning of the sentence. We propose a method of supervised regression learning to estimate complexity ordering of words with statistical features obtained from two types of Japa...

The current project investigated the extent to which several lexical aspects of second language (L2) speech—appropriateness, fluency, variation, sophistication, abstractness, sense relations— interact to influence native speakers’ judgements of comprehensibility (ease of understanding) and accentedness (linguistic nativelikeness). Extemporaneous speech elicited from 40 French speakers of Englis...

Native speakers of a language find some sentences more difficult to understand than others. The sources of difficulty vary: some are lexical (e.g., the use of unknown words), some are due to the lack of contextual information (e.g., no shared knowledge), and some are due to structural complexity. Here we will focus on the difficulties caused by one kind of structural complexity, center embeddin...

In this paper we introduce the online version of our ReaderBench framework, which includes multi-lingual comprehension-centered web services designed to address a wide range of individual and collaborative learning scenarios, as follows. First, students can be engaged in reading a course material, then eliciting their understanding of it; the reading strategies component provides an in-depth pe...

This paper focuses on two disparate aspects of German syntax from the perspective of parallel grammar development. As part of a cooperative project, we present an innovative approach to auxiliaries and multiple genitive NPs in German. The LFG-based implementation presented here avoids unnessary structural complexity in the representation of auxiliaries by challenging the traditional analysis of...