LuCET Project is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive and systematic perspective on Linguistic Complexity (LC) and its interaction with Processing Difficulty (PD) in a given language in production and comprehension, for typically and atypically developing participants, and for monolingual and multilingual users.
The multidimensionality of LC and its effects on PD will be tackled with sophisticated computational models. The NLP approach will make available to the scientific community tools for analyzing and measuring LC in Italian, which might then be extended to other languages.
The project will propose a set of theoretical definitions of LC and their operational measures, together with a standardized procedure for the assessment of LC in production and reception.
The software tools based on the project’s theoretical and empirical contributions will be made available online, to be used by teachers and students at the end of secondary education and at the beginning of university, to profile learners’ strengths and weaknesses in reading comprehension and the complexity of their writing.