Reducing lexical complexity as a tool to increase text accessibility for children with dyslexia

Núria Gala, Johannes Ziegler


Abstract
Lexical complexity plays a central role in readability, particularly for dyslexic children and poor readers because of their slow and laborious decoding and word recognition skills. Although some features to aid readability may be common to most languages (e.g., the majority of ‘easy’ words are of low frequency), we believe that lexical complexity is mainly language-specific. In this paper, we define lexical complexity for French and we present a pilot study on the effects of text simplification in dyslexic children. The participants were asked to read out loud original and manually simplified versions of a standardized French text corpus and to answer comprehension questions after reading each text. The analysis of the results shows that the simplifications performed were beneficial in terms of reading speed and they reduced the number of reading errors (mainly lexical ones) without a loss in comprehension. Although the number of participants in this study was rather small (N=10), the results are promising and contribute to the development of applications in computational linguistics.
Anthology ID:
W16-4107
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC)
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Venue:
CL4LC
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
59–66
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-4107
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Núria Gala and Johannes Ziegler. 2016. Reducing lexical complexity as a tool to increase text accessibility for children with dyslexia. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC), pages 59–66, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Reducing lexical complexity as a tool to increase text accessibility for children with dyslexia (Gala & Ziegler, CL4LC 2016)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/W16-4107.pdf