A Linguistic Analysis of Simplified and Authentic Texts

Crossley, Scotta A.; Louwerse, Maxm M.; McCarthy, Philip M.; McNamara, Danielle S.

doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.2007.00507.x

Cited by 198 publications

(185 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Authentic and simplified reading texts have been found to differ in causal cohesion (the extent to which the elements of the text are connected causally), and the density of logical operators, with authentic texts having greater cohesion and more logical operators (Crossley et al, 2007). These results provide additional evidence that authentic materials may have greater coherence than created materials.…”

Section: Authenticity and Coherencesupporting

confidence: 60%

“…learner of experience with many elements of the L2 (e.g., lexical reductions like can't, a realistic speech rate, disfluencies; Breen, 1985;Cobb, 2004;Crossley, McCarthy, Louwerse, & McNamara, 2007;Long & Ross, 2009;Rings, 1986;Rogers & Medley, 1988), experimental evidence shows that L2 learners benefit from experience with authentic materials (Herron & Seay, 1991;Kienbaum, Russell, & Welty, 1986). Of primary concern to the current literature review, however, is just how authentic passages might differ from created passages in terms of passage-based and context-based factors of interest, and the impact these differences are likely to have on the difficulty of the passage for an L2 listener.…”

Section: Anxietymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

What makes listening difficult? Factors affecting second language listening comprehension

Bloomfield¹,

Wayland²,

Rhoades³

et al. 2010

150

120

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Factors affecting second language listening comprehension gies-that is, those who are aware of and use effective strategies, such as avoiding mental translation-demonstrate better L2 listening comprehension. 2 In addition to these general cognitive abilities, a number of factors pertaining to experience with the L2 influence listening skill. These factors include the amount of prior exposure to the language; familiarity with and an ability to understand the non-native language's phonology; vocabulary size; and background knowledge about the topic, text, structure, schema, and culture.Familiarity with the L2 changes the extent to which the L2 listener uses top-down or bottom-up strategies in listening. For example, expert listeners use both types of strategies: They are able to accurately make sense of the speech signal (bottom-up information) 3 and integrate this information with PurPose-To establish what is currently known about factors that affect foreign language listening comprehension, with a focus on characteristics of the listener, passage, and testing conditions.ConClusions-Research on second language (L2) listening comprehension strongly supports the importance of a number of factors, for example, a listener's working memory capacity and the number of ideas in a passage. Much of the research, however, reports weak or inconclusive results, leaving many factors and complex interactions among factors unresolved and in need of further investigation.relevanCe-Identifying the factors that affect L2 listening comprehension will help Defense Language Institute Proficiency Test (DLPT) designers anticipate how qualities of selected authentic materials will impact listening comprehension. Executive Summary PurPoseThe U.S. Government administers the Defense Language Proficiency Test (DLPT) to military linguists and other government personnel to assess their listening and reading comprehension in a number of foreign languages, including critical languages such as Mandarin, Modern Standard Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, and Persian Farsi. The DLPT is updated every 10 to 15 years, and the most recent transition-from DLPT IV to DLPT5-included a greater emphasis on testing listening comprehension with authentic materials. In turn, this has led to a growing interest in the factors that make second language (L2) listening difficult.To examine these factors, CASL reviewed the current scientific literature and summarized the characteristics of listeners, passages, and testing conditions. The review targeted features of particular interest to stakeholders at the Defense Language Institute (DLI). The long-term goal of the project is to support the selection of authentic listening materials that accurately reflect different proficiency levels. ConClusionsAlthough the available research on L2 listening comprehension is limited, CASL's literature review identified several factors that affect listening comprehension. These factors are summarized below and in Tables 1, 2, and 3. 1 Characteristics of the listenerUnderstanding a fo...

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Section: Authenticity and Coherencesupporting

confidence: 60%

Section: Anxietymentioning

confidence: 99%

What makes listening difficult? Factors affecting second language listening comprehension

Bloomfield¹,

Wayland²,

Rhoades³

et al. 2010

150

120

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…La cláusula no varía significativamente en líneas generales, por lo que parece que su simplificación se siente menos necesaria. Crossley, Louwerse, McCarthy y McNamara (2007) encontraron que los textos nativos tenían una Longitud de cláusula menor que los textos no-nativos. Tal vez esto se debiera en su caso al intento de simplificar las oraciones complejas usando complementos nominales en lugar de cláusulas subordinadas.…”

Section: Conclusionesunclassified

“…No hay apenas estudios en español sobre este particular, con la excepción de un estudio piloto de Checa-Garcia (2005b). En inglés se realizó un estudio similar (Crossley, Louwerse, McCarthy y McNamara, 2007) para describir las diferencias lingüísticas encontradas entre textos originales para hablantes nativos y textos elaborados para hablantes no nativos, encontrán-dose algunas diferencias significativas.…”

Section: Introducción: Complejidad Morfosintáctica Y Dificultad De Launclassified

Complejidad gramatical y niveles de dificultad en lecturas de ELE adaptadas y originales

Checa-García

2013

RLA

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RESUMENLas lecturas de español ELE son clasificadas por las editoriales en varios niveles de dificultad. Sin embargo, poco o ningún criterio se ofrece para su clasificación. Si algún criterio se menciona, éste se refiere a la diversidad de vocabulario, pero no a la complejidad morfosintáctica. Este estudio trata de responder a dos cuestiones fundamentales: a) ¿Hay una relación entre ciertos índices de complejidad morfosintáctica y niveles de dificultad de las lecturas? y b) ¿Difieren los índices de complejidad morfosintáctica de los textos creados originalmente como lecturas ELE y de los que provienen de adaptaciones? En una muestra de 61 fragmentos pertenecientes a 3 niveles diferentes de dificultad (básico, intermedio y avanzado) se analizan los índices primarios de madurez sintáctica y la diversidad verbal. Los resultados muestran que las diferencias entre niveles de dificultad son sólo significativas para los textos originales (aquellos que se crearon originalmente como lecturas ELE vs. textos que son adaptaciones). Además, los niveles intermedio y avanzado se diferencian mucho menos entre sí que con respecto al nivel básico.Palabras clave: Complejidad sintáctica, lecturas ELE, dificultad de lectura, lectura en L2, adquisición de lenguas extranjeras, español como lengua extranjera. ABSTRACTSpanish L2 readings are classified by editors into different difficulty levels. However, very few criteria if any are mentioned for the classification. When some criterion is mentioned, it is a measure of vocabulary diversity, with no reference to morphosyntactic complexity. The present study seeks to answer two main questions: a) is there a relation between certain indexes of morphosyntactic complexity and the readings levels of difficulty?, and b) are texts created as L2 readings and texts adapted from originally L1 readings different

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“…Then, we perform an exploratory analysis to investigate how four psycholinguistic variables -age of acquisition (AoA), familiarity, concreteness, and imageability -, previously linked to metaphor comprehension (see, for instance, (Paivio et al, 1968;Paivio and Walsh, 1993;Gibbs, 2006;Ureña and Faber, 2010)) and also used in simplification models (e.g. (Cross- , 2007;Jauhar and Specia, 2012;Crossley et al, 2012;Vajjala and Meurers, 2014)), behave across simplification categories. The scores have been extracted from the MRC Psycholinguistic Database (Wilson, 1988) and the Bristol Norms (Kuperman et al, 2012).…”

Section: Corpus Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Simplifying metaphorical language for young readers: A corpus study on news text

Wolska¹,

Clausen²

2017

Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

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The paper presents first results of an ongoing project on text simplification focusing on linguistic metaphors. Based on an analysis of a parallel corpus of news text professionally simplified for different grade levels, we identify six types of simplification choices falling into two broad categories: preserving metaphors or dropping them. An annotation study on almost 300 source sentences with metaphors (grade level 12) and their simplified counterparts (grade 4) is conducted. The results show that most metaphors are preserved and when they are dropped, the semantic content tends to be preserved rather than dropped, however, it is reworded without metaphorical language. In general, some of the expected tendencies in complexity reduction, measured with psycholinguistic variables linked to metaphor comprehension, are observed, suggesting good prospect for machine learning-based metaphor simplification. Motivation and problem statementText simplification is the process of meaning preserving reduction of discourse complexity whose purpose is to adapt text for specific populations of readers, for instance, children or language learners. The idea has been around since "My Weekly Reader" in the 1920s and Palmer's work (1932) and over the past 20 years has attracted attention of the computational linguistics community. While broadly interpreted "lexical simplification" -in general understood as substitution of "difficult" words with "simpler" ones -is a common component of automated simplification systems (see, for instance, (Siddharthan, 2014)), studies of text simplification dedicated to specific lexis-related semantic phenomena are lacking. One class of such understudied phenomena are those related to figurative language; a surprising gap in the simplification research considering that metaphors have been shown to cause difficulties in text comprehension and that developing metaphor interpretation competence is a complex developmental process (for an overview, see, for instance, (Winner, 1997)). Since automated systems are trained on corpora of simplified text, understanding patterns of metaphor simplification based on corpus data could help improve simplification models.In this paper we present a study that is our first step in this direction.We analyze linguistic metaphors in a corpus of news texts professionally simplified for different grade levels. While editors' guidelines instructed to avoid vivid metaphors, such as "paint into a corner", our goal was to find out whether, and if so, how, linguistic metaphors in general are simplified by professional editors. Since ultimately we want to build automated metaphor simplification models, the purpose of this study is to investigate whether metaphors in a corpus of professionally simplified text, that is, potential training data, are simplified in systematic ways. Specifically, we were interested in two questions: 1) What types of discourse modifications do editors perform when simplifying metaphorical language? (in other words, whether a well-defined set...

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A Linguistic Analysis of Simplified and Authentic Texts

Cited by 198 publications

References 45 publications

What makes listening difficult? Factors affecting second language listening comprehension

What makes listening difficult? Factors affecting second language listening comprehension

Complejidad gramatical y niveles de dificultad en lecturas de ELE adaptadas y originales

Simplifying metaphorical language for young readers: A corpus study on news text

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