@inproceedings{munda-arhar-holdt-2025-first,
    title = "First Insights into the Syntax of {S}lovene Student Writing: A Statistical Analysis of {\v{S}}olar 3.0 vs. U{\v{c}}beniki 1.0",
    author = "Munda, Tina  and
      Arhar Holdt, {\v{S}}pela",
    editor = "Chen, Xinying  and
      Wang, Yaqin",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Quantitative Syntax (QUASY, SyntaxFest 2025)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Ljubljana, Slovenia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/corrections-2025-08/2025.quasy-1.13/",
    pages = "105--114",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-293-0",
    abstract = "This study investigates the syntactic features of Slovene student writing by comparing essays from the {\v{S}}olar 3.0 corpus (ages 13{--}19; primary and secondary school levels) with textbook texts from the U{\v{c}}beniki 1.0 corpus aligned to the same educational stages. We apply quantitative syntactic analysis at two complementary levels: clause-type frequency (coordination, parataxis, and four types of subordination) and tree-based syntactic complexity measures (number of clauses, clauses per T-unit, and maximum parse-tree depth). Results show that students heavily rely on coordination and specific subordinate clauses (especially object and adverbial), producing more clauses per sentence and per T-unit than textbooks. However, their sentences tend to exhibit flatter syntactic structures, with shallower embedding in primary school and only modest increases in tree depth by secondary school. These findings reveal a divergence between surface-level complexity and hierarchical depth, highlighting developmental trends and instructional targets in written syntactic maturity. We conclude by discussing implications for syntactic development and directions for future research."
}