LuCET 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.
It involves multiple disciplinary perspectives, such as theoretical, computational, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics and psychometrics, thus representing a highly original contribution to LC research. This multidimensionality of LC and its effects on PD will be tackled with sophisticated computational models, which is another original feature of the project. The NLP approach will also 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, which constitutes another valuable contribution to a field where research has often suffered from a scarcely organized multitude of measures and approaches.
To ensure the highest dissemination of results in the scientific community, LuCET data and research findings, with the exception of confidential information supplied by participants and stakeholders, will be made publicly available, and all or most publications will appear Open Access. LuCET will also produce data and software resources, including: annotated corpora of different types; elicitation tests and evaluation protocols targeting different populations; linguistic complexity feature sets and measures; tools for linguistic annotation, feature extraction and computational models of LC and PD.