Higher Syntactic Complexity Research Articles

Effects of collaborative vs. individual pre-task planning on EFL learners’ L2 writing: transferability of writing quality

Although many studies have investigated the differential effects of collaborative pre-task planning (CP), individual pre-task planning (IP), and no pre-task planning (NP) on EFL learners’ writing quality, none has explored such effects under the condition of combining IP with CP and whether such potential effects can be transferred to a new writing task. To bridge this gap, the study assigned 120 Chinese college learners to one of the four groups: CP group, IP group, IPCP group, and NP group. Two argumentative writing tasks were used in this study to collect the required data. To produce task 1, the learners in CP, IP, and IPCP groups were asked to do the relevant planning tasks before writing, while the learners in the NP group were required to write immediately. To explore learning transfer, one week after they produced task 1, the learners in all four groups were required to produce task 2, for which there was no planning time. The results showed that the learners under the CP condition composed writings with higher syntactic complexity than the learners under IP, IPCP, and NP conditions for both two tasks, with no such effects found for other measures of writing quality. Limitations, suggestions for future studies, and implications were discussed.

Syntax, stress and cognitive load, or on syntactic processing in simultaneous interpreting

Abstract This corpus-based study examines the effect of syntactic complexity in the source language on simultaneous interpreters’ cognitive load and stress. Previous studies show contrasting results regarding the source text syntax and cognitive load in interpreting, while the link between syntactic complexity and interpreters’ stress remains unexplored. Our research aims to fill this gap by measuring cognitive load through filled and silent pauses, and stress through fundamental frequency. We evaluated syntactic complexity by calculating dependency distance, i.e., the number of words between syntactically dependent elements. We used PINC, the Polish Interpreting Corpus (Chmiel et al. 2022), as our dataset. We found that higher syntactic complexity in the source text increases stress and cognitive load among interpreters. Additionally, when interpreters produce complex syntax themselves, their stress increases. The study provides empirical evidence for simplification in interpreting and shows that syntactic complexity in interpreters’ own output does not necessarily lead to increased cognitive load.

Analysis of Textual Complexity in Danish News Articles on Climate Change

Structural linguistic features are often overlooked yet potentially important aspects of journalistic practice. Especially in news reporting on climate change, these features can play a crucial role as the proper use of language is tied to message credibility, processing fluency and knowledge retention, which can positively influence the reader to take more climate action. This article analyzes language use in Danish news articles on climate change using a sample of around 32,000 articles from four different outlet types (quality news, niche papers, tabloids, and public service broadcasters) published from 1990 to 2021. We create a machine-learning model of text complexity covering this concept’s semantic and syntactic dimensions. Our findings confirm expected differences in complexity between news outlets, highlighting tabloid articles as engaging with higher semantic complexity, while quality papers and niche papers exhibit higher syntactic complexity. We observe a significant decrease in semantic complexity and a slight increase in syntactic complexity over time, a trend towards more generic language, and an increased use of pronouns, verbs, and adverbs. Most of these changes can be attributed to the emergence of articles by public service broadcasters. Articles by public service broadcasters are characterised by high syntactic complexity, which we consider problematic due to their popularity among the general public.

A Chinese named entity recognition model incorporating recurrent cell and information state recursion

Chinese is characterized by high syntactic complexity, chaotic annotation granularity, and slow convergence. Joint learning models can effectively improve the accuracy of Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER), but they focus too much on local feature information and reduce the ability of long sequence feature extraction. To address the limitations of long sequence feature extraction ability, we propose a Chinese NER model called Incorporating Recurrent Cell and Information State Recursion (IRCSR-NER). The model integrates recurrent cells and information state recursion to improve the recognition ability of long entity boundaries. To solve the problem that Chinese and English have different focuses in syntactic analysis. We use the syntactic dependency approach to add lexical relationship information to sentences represented at the word level. The IRCSR-NER is applied to sequence feature extraction to improve the model efficiency and long-text feature extraction ability. The model captures contextual long-distance dependent information while focusing on local feature information. We evaluated our proposed model using four public datasets and compared it with other mainstream models. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms traditional and mainstream models.

Children’s Narrative Retells: The Influence of Character Realism and Storybook Theme on Central and Peripheral Detail

ABSTRACT Research Findings: Anthropomorphized animal characters have been associated with negative influences on educational outcomes for young children, for example story comprehension and prosocial learning from moral tales. In this study we investigate how character realism and moral theme influence young children’s recall of the story content. Retells were examined for length, syntactic complexity, and centrality as indices of memory and understanding. Participants were 171 children (age 3–7 years) from 6 rural schools in the Northwest of England. We found no significant influence of story character on the measures under test. Retells with a prosocial sharing theme had higher syntactic complexity and greater centrality than those with a busy theme. Practice or Policy: The results suggest that animal characters are not necessarily an impediment to coherent representations of stories. The central message from a prosocial themed story appeared to be more strongly retained than that of a closely matched story with no prosocial lesson. This suggests story theme to be a potential influence that should be considered when testing children’s narrative comprehension.

Effects of task variations on language productivity, syntactic complexity, and stuttering in children who stutter

ABSTRACT Purpose. The aim of this preliminary study was to compare the effects of variations in task demands on: (a) language productivity in sentences categorised into stuttered vs. non-stuttered sentences; (b) syntactic complexity in stuttered vs. non-stuttered sentence categories, and (c) stuttering and typical disfluencies in school-age children who stutter (CWS). Language Sample Analysis (LSA) was conducted on samples from three tasks – Conversation, fable retell, and critical thinking based on the fables. Methods. Participants were 14 CWS categorised into younger (9 to 12-year-olds, n = 8) and older age groups (13 to 15-year-olds, n = 6). The Computerized Language ANalysis program was used to conduct language and disfluency analyses. Repeated measures analysis of variance and nonparametric statistical analyses were used to investigate: (a) Language productivity in total number of words and sentences by task and sentence category; (b) Syntactic complexity at the word- (use of metacognitive verbs), phrase- (use of verb phrases), and utterance (Mean Length of Utterances in words, MLUw) levels by task and sentence category; and (c) Disfluencies measured using % stuttered syllables (%SS) and % typical disfluencies (%TD). Results and Conclusions. Task effects in language productivity did not differ by sentence category and suggested limited influences of propositionality and volubility in stuttering. In contrast, higher syntactic complexity was obtained in the stuttered compared to non-stuttered sentences at the word, phrase, and utterance levels and it was the same task – conversation, that elicited the effect. Additionally, variations in task demands did not result in significant differences in %SS. The findings inform assessment planning with the selection of tasks guided by task demands and assessment requirements.

The effect of picture support on narrative retells in Swedish adolescents with ADHD

ABSTRACT ADHD is characterized by executive functioning (EF) deficits, which in turn may affect language, and therefore EF demands in language assessment tasks are important to consider. This study aims to inform clinical practice by 1) comparing and describing narrative retells in Swedish adolescents with and without ADHD, and 2) investigating the effects of picture support on narration in the two groups. Fifteen adolescents with ADHD and 31 with typical development (TD) participated. Two carefully matched narratives for retelling, one with and one without picture support were administered, transcribed, and analyzed regarding content and linguistic complexity (macro- and microlevel measures). The results showed that the ADHD group included less content than the TD group in both tasks, measured in fewer story grammar units and details. Both groups included more story grammar units in the task without picture support. The TD group had shorter retells with higher syntactic complexity in the task with picture support compared to the task without picture support. Compared to TD peers, retells without picture support from the ADHD group were significantly shorter and had a higher proportion of grammatical errors. These results show different strengths and weaknesses in the two groups and indicate that the narrative task without picture support, which places higher demands on EF, captured a linguistic vulnerability in the ADHD group. In conclusion, the choice of narrative task is important to consider in clinical practice to enable accurate descriptions of linguistic strengths and weaknesses in individuals with ADHD, and aid in differential diagnosis.

A comparison of text structure and self-regulated strategy instruction for elementary school students’ writing

PurposeThis study aims to examine the writing outcomes of 6th-grade students learning English as a second language.Design/methodology/approachIn all 45 students in a text structure instruction (TSI) group were compared with 45 students in a self-regulated strategy instruction (SRSI) group and 43 students receiving traditional writing instruction. SRSI was adapted from the self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) model (MacArthur et al., 2015). The SRSD model includes self-regulation writing strategies, text and genre knowledge and think-aloud modeling. Findings allowed for a comparison of TSI and SRSI, in which organization knowledge does not need to be taught using SRSD methods. Measures of writing outcomes, including writing quality and summarization of main ideas, were administered after a one-month intervention.FindingsResults revealed that, compared with traditional instruction, the TSI and SRSI groups each exhibited better writing outcomes. Compared with the traditional instruction group, each technique had a unique impact: SRSI on writing quality, and TSI on main ideas included in written summaries. Linguistic and textual analyses of students’ writing revealed that the TSI and SRSI group learners both demonstrated high syntactic complexity, content organization and lexical variation in their compositions.Research limitations/implicationsThe present study provides empirical evidence that explicit teaching of SRSI writing strategies or TSI can be implemented effectively and elicit gains in elementary school L2 learners’ written output. A clear division does not exist between self-regulated writing strategies and text structure knowledge; the two techniques should be complementary, as suggested in the earlier SRSD model.Originality/valueClassroom-based research has addressed the need to enhance self-regulated capacity in writing. However, writing has become more challenging for primary school learners. In addition, writing is a cognitively demanding process. The plethora of processes involved in writing may be one of the factors that caused difficulties in writing. Thus, writing proficiency relies on the development of text structure knowledge and the fostering of self-regulation capabilities.

Literary research article abstracts: An analysis of rhetorical moves and their linguistic realizations

Research article abstracts are the most effective means of sharing research results. This function and the evolution of the research article genre have kept the abstract in the focus of academic investigations. However, despite the impressive research output on abstracts, research addressing specifically literature research article (LRA) abstracts is scarce. This study, therefore, describes the move structure of the LRA abstract, defines the functions of the identified moves, and discusses their linguistic realizations. To conduct the research, a corpus consisting of 135 abstracts from four international journals with high impact factors was compiled and subjected (a) to move analysis performed by a human analyst and (b) to software-driven analyses involving text analysis software. The results reveal that LRA abstracts have a non-hierarchical eight-move structure with four stable moves, whose functions are to present the background, purpose, methodology and outcomes of the research. LRA abstracts are a mix of the descriptive and informative abstracts and structurally overlap with the rhetorical structure of RA introductions. They have high syntactic complexity and lexical density and contain primarily low frequency words. These features and their high information content make them difficult to process.

La articulación del espacio doméstico en las casas de patio central. Un estudio para el Noreste peninsular ibérico entre los siglos IV - II a. C.

In this paper we approach a diachronic comparative study through space syntax analysis methodology of a set of courtyard houses from the East of the Iberian Peninsula dated between the IVth century and the IInd B.C., period previous and immediately to the beginning of Roman domination of these regions. These big complex houses with courtyard have been interpreted as the residences of minority powerful groups, that is to say, local aristocracy. In view of this, we shall try to study the evolution of this social class during this period characterized by economic and politic changes. Domestic space syntax analyses allows us to see the consequences of the adoption of formal changes in houses, for the social relationships. The high syntactic complexity observed in protohistorical houses is the main difference between these and roman houses.

Linguistic and auditory temporal processing in children with specific language impairment.

Several studies suggest the association of specific language impairment (SLI) to deficits in auditory processing. It has been evidenced that children with SLI present deficit in brief stimuli discrimination. Such deficit would lead to difficulties in developing phonological abilities necessary to map phonemes and to effectively and automatically code and decode words and sentences. However, the correlation between temporal processing (TP) and specific deficits in language disorders--such as syntactic comprehension abilities--has received little or no attention. To analyze the correlation between: TP (through the Frequency Pattern Test--FPT) and Syntactic Complexity Comprehension (through a Sentence Comprehension Task). Sixteen children with typical language development (8;9 +/- 1;1 years) and seven children with SLI (8;1 +/- 1;2 years) participated on the study. Accuracy of both groups decreased with the increase on syntactic complexity (both p < 0.01). On the between groups comparison, performance difference on the Test of Syntactic Complexity Comprehension (TSCC) was statistically significant (p = 0.02).As expected, children with SLI presented FPT performance outside reference values. On the SLI group, correlations between TSCC and FPT were positive and higher for high syntactic complexity (r = 0.97) than for low syntactic complexity (r = 0.51). Results suggest that FPT is positively correlated to syntactic complexity comprehension abilities.The low performance on FPT could serve as an additional indicator of deficits in complex linguistic processing. Future studies should consider, besides the increase of the sample, longitudinal studies that investigate the effect of frequency pattern auditory training on performance in high syntactic complexity comprehension tasks.

Influences of utterance length and complexity on speech motor performance in children and adults.

The possible influences of utterance length and complexity on speech motor performance were examined by assessing the effects of increased processing demands on articulatory movement stability. Eight 5-year-old children and 8 young adults repeated a 6-syllable phrase in isolation (baseline condition) and embedded in sentences of low and high syntactic complexity. Lower lip movements for the target phrase were analyzed to produce the spatiotemporal index (STI), an index that reflects the stability of lip movement over 10 repetitions of the phrase. It was predicted that movement stability would be lower (reflected by higher values of the STI) for the phrase when it was spoken embedded in complex sentences and that, compared to adults, children's movement output would be more negatively affected by increased processing demands. The STI was significantly increased for the phrase spoken in the complex sentences compared to the baseline condition, and STIs of the children were consistently higher than those of the adults across conditions. These findings provide novel evidence that speech motor planning, execution, or both are affected by processes often considered to be relatively remote from the motor output stage.