Structural-Lexical Friction: A Cross-Register Computational Study of Text Difficulty
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| Natura: | Recurso digital |
| Lingua: | inglese |
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Zenodo
2026
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| _version_ | 1866902114265989120 |
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| author | Kim, JaeHo |
| author_facet | Kim, JaeHo |
| contents | <p>Classical readability formulas predict text difficulty from surface counts and bring grammatical structure into the calculation only through sentence length. This paper introduces structural-lexical friction — the cognitive cost a reader pays when lexical and syntactic demands rise together — and measures it with a transparent index set across 16,904 English passages. The corpus pulls from four high-density informational registers (anchored by the Korean College Scholastic Ability Test and LogiQA) and five baseline registers. A pre-pooling Mann-Whitney U test shows that CSAT and LogiQA cannot be combined: every parser-derived index distinguishes them. The headline ablation runs in two stages — length-controlled classification, then a length-matched sub-corpus restricted to 150–190 words per passage. Parser-aware features yield a reliable AUC gain over surface-only baselines (p<10^(-4), paired DeLong), and the gap grows as length is held first by feature exclusion and then by sample selection. A word-count-matched adversarial design then separates the construct cleanly. Mean Clausal Depth (MCD) shifts by 1.36 units (p<10^(-4)) while Flesch Reading Ease registers no detectable movement. Three independent dependency parsers reproduce the headline signal, ruling out a single-pipeline artefact. What looks like redundancy of parser-aware indices in conventional readability tasks turns out to be mechanical, since Flesch's W/S term absorbs clausal embedding through sentence length; once length is pinned down physically, the structural signal recovers in full.</p> |
| format | Recurso digital |
| id | zenodo_https___doi_org_10_5281_zenodo_20390729 |
| institution | Zenodo |
| language | eng |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| publisher | Zenodo |
| record_format | zenodo |
| spellingShingle | Structural-Lexical Friction: A Cross-Register Computational Study of Text Difficulty Kim, JaeHo structural-lexical friction syntactic complexity readability text complexity clausal embedding dependency parsing cross-register variation computational linguistics L2 reading comprehension <p>Classical readability formulas predict text difficulty from surface counts and bring grammatical structure into the calculation only through sentence length. This paper introduces structural-lexical friction — the cognitive cost a reader pays when lexical and syntactic demands rise together — and measures it with a transparent index set across 16,904 English passages. The corpus pulls from four high-density informational registers (anchored by the Korean College Scholastic Ability Test and LogiQA) and five baseline registers. A pre-pooling Mann-Whitney U test shows that CSAT and LogiQA cannot be combined: every parser-derived index distinguishes them. The headline ablation runs in two stages — length-controlled classification, then a length-matched sub-corpus restricted to 150–190 words per passage. Parser-aware features yield a reliable AUC gain over surface-only baselines (p<10^(-4), paired DeLong), and the gap grows as length is held first by feature exclusion and then by sample selection. A word-count-matched adversarial design then separates the construct cleanly. Mean Clausal Depth (MCD) shifts by 1.36 units (p<10^(-4)) while Flesch Reading Ease registers no detectable movement. Three independent dependency parsers reproduce the headline signal, ruling out a single-pipeline artefact. What looks like redundancy of parser-aware indices in conventional readability tasks turns out to be mechanical, since Flesch's W/S term absorbs clausal embedding through sentence length; once length is pinned down physically, the structural signal recovers in full.</p> |
| title | Structural-Lexical Friction: A Cross-Register Computational Study of Text Difficulty |
| topic | structural-lexical friction syntactic complexity readability text complexity clausal embedding dependency parsing cross-register variation computational linguistics L2 reading comprehension |
| url | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20390729 |