Measuring Syntactic Complexity in Spontaneous Spoken Swedish

Abstract

Hesitation disfluencies after phonetically prominent stranded function words are thought to reflect the cognitive coding of complex structures. Speech fragments following the Swedish function word att 'that' were analyzed syntactically, and divided into two groups: one with att in disfluent contexts, and the other with att in fluent contexts. Complexity was calculated in terms of a number of measures related to syntactic tree structures produced by the analysis tool GRAMMAL. Results showed that disfluent att is in general associated with significantly higher mean complexity values than fluent att. This information can be used to predict whether the function word at the beginning of a fragment is likely to be disfluent or not. Two kinds of statistical classification algorithms (Bayesian and neural networks) were used to test this hypothesis. The best result was 71% correctly classified cases, which is significantly better than a system that is based on selecting the data's majority class.

Insights from Russian second language readability classification: complexity-dependent training requirements, and feature evaluation of multiple categories

“…A thorough conceptual and historical overview of readability research can be found in Vajjala (2015, §2.2). The last decade has seen a rise in research on readability classification, primarily focused on English, but also including French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Swedish (Roll et al, 2007;Vor der Brück et al, 2008;Aluisio et al, 2010;Francois and Watrin, 2011;Dell'Orletta et al, 2011;Hancke et al, 2012;Pilán et al, 2015). Broadly speaking, these languages have limited morphology in comparison with Russian, which has relatively rich morphology among major world languages.…”

Linguistic Factors Influencing Speech Audiometric Assessment

“…More recently, several attempts have been made to operationalize this concept in an objective way [28–31]. Various measures have been proposed, ranging from using pure length (as in the number of syllables, words, or intonation units) of an utterance as a proxy for syntactic complexity to fully fledged in-depth analyses of syntactic tree structures [31].…”

“…Various measures have been proposed, ranging from using pure length (as in the number of syllables, words, or intonation units) of an utterance as a proxy for syntactic complexity to fully fledged in-depth analyses of syntactic tree structures [31]. Although the first approach has the advantage of being readily available, involving no additional structural analysis, it has been shown at many occasions that increased sentence length does not necessarily go hand in hand with increased syntactic complexity.…”

“…The number of syntactic nodes may be taken to reflect part of the computational resources required by the human brain to structure a sequence of words. Roll et al [31] show that the total number of syntactic nodes in a sentence is a very robust measure of syntactic complexity that is able to account for differences in disfluency of spontaneous speech.…”

Reading Comprehension of Different Genres: A Fuzzy Approach

“…A review of the literature reveals that different studies have used different units for analysis (Budd, 1988;Distefano and Valencia, 1980;Andoline, 1980;Bardovi-Harlig and Bofman 1988;Bardovi-Harlig, 1992;Hosseinchary andYosefy 1387/2008;Samim-Banihashemi 1371Frid, Horne, and Roll 2007;Rashidi and Shahballa 2010). The present study has focused on idea units and main ideas.…”