Syntactic Complexity and Processing Difficulty: Towards an Objective Syntactic Measure of Text Simplification
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Abstract
This paper focuses on the syntactic complexity of two versions of the Spanish short story Un Stradivarius: a simplified version adapted for college Spanish learners, and the original version for Spanish native speakers. Hawkins' (1994) assumption that structural complexity is linked to difficulty in processing, led him to offer a theory of syntactic complexity in terms of Structural Domains (SD). His metric of processing complexity, Immediate Constituent (IC)-to-non-IC ratios within a Constituent Recognition Domain (CRD), was used to calculate the syntactic complexity of the two texts. CRDs whose ratios are high are preferred, since a high ratio indicates that there is not much structure within the CRDs. Conversely, low ratios reveal more additional words within the CRDs. It is hypothesized that the two texts will differ in their CRDs, both for sentences (Ss) and verb phrases (VPs): the adapted version of the story is expected to have higher ratios for its CRDs per sentence than the original text. In other words, the adapted version is hypothesized to be less complex syntactically, and thus easier to process by the learner/parser. The hypothesis was not confirmed, the modifications found in the adapted text were of the elaborative type (Ferguson & DeBose, 1977; Loschky, 1994), rather than syntactic simplifications.
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