The present paper is a reply to the article Perspektivy korpusové lingvistiky: deskripce, nebo explanace by František Štícha (2015) which is a critique of recent studies by Radek Čech (2014) and Jan Chromý (2014). It is shown that Štícha’s argumentation is based on an inaccurate reading of the two criticized studies. Also, Štícha’s conception of corpus linguistics as a discipline which aims to capture the morphological and syntactical norm of well-educated people is rather limited. This narrow-minded view seems to be another reason of Štícha’s misunderstanding of the criticized papers.
Příspěvek podává přehled o komplexním psycholingvistickém tématu úpadku rodného jazyka u zdravých jedinců, ke kterému se často odkazuje jako k (first) language attrition (zde především jako jazyková eroze, případně jazyková ztráta). Studie se zabývá tím, co jazykovou erozi vyvolává, podmiňuje a ovlivňuje, jak se liší u dětí oproti dospělým mluvčím, které jazykové oblasti jsou jí zasaženy a jakým způsobem. Kromě těchto čistě teoretických otázek jsou řešeny i metodologické aspekty výzkumu tohoto fenoménu. V textu je celá diskutovaná oblast začleněna do širšího kontextu pohlížejícího na jazyk jako na dynamický systém. Z této perspektivy může být jazyková eroze vnímána jako zvláštní manifestace vývoje či rozvoje jazyka, který trvá po celý život mluvčího. and The article gives an overview of the complex psycholinguistic topic of first language decay in healthy individuals, often called (first) language attrition. It deals with what triggers, determines and influences the process of attrition, how the attrition differs between adults and children, which language areas are affected and how. Additionally, methodological aspects of attrition research are also discussed. This specific research domain is put into the broader context of viewing language as a dynamic system. Under this perspective, language attrition is seen as a special case of lifelong language development.
LiFR-Law is a corpus of Czech legal and administrative texts with measured reading comprehension and a subjective expert annotation of diverse textual properties based on the Hamburg Comprehensibility Concept (Langer, Schulz von Thun, Tausch, 1974). It has been built as a pilot data set to explore the Linguistic Factors of Readability (hence the LiFR acronym) in Czech administrative and legal texts, modeling their correlation with actually observed reading comprehension. The corpus is comprised of 18 documents in total; that is, six different texts from the legal/administration domain, each in three versions: the original and two paraphrases. Each such document triple shares one reading-comprehension test administered to at least thirty readers of random gender, educational background, and age. The data set also captures basic demographic information about each reader, their familiarity with the topic, and their subjective assessment of the stylistic properties of the given document, roughly corresponding to the key text properties identified by the Hamburg Comprehensibility Concept.
LiFR-Law is a corpus of Czech legal and administrative texts with measured reading comprehension and a subjective expert annotation of diverse textual properties based on the Hamburg Comprehensibility Concept (Langer, Schulz von Thun, Tausch, 1974). It has been built as a pilot data set to explore the Linguistic Factors of Readability (hence the LiFR acronym) in Czech administrative and legal texts, modeling their correlation with actually observed reading comprehension. The corpus is comprised of 18 documents in total; that is, six different texts from the legal/administration domain, each in three versions: the original and two paraphrases. Each such document triple shares one reading-comprehension test administered to at least thirty readers of random gender, educational background, and age. The data set also captures basic demographic information about each reader, their familiarity with the topic, and their subjective assessment of the stylistic properties of the given document, roughly corresponding to the key text properties identified by the Hamburg Comprehensibility Concept.
Changes to the previous version and helpful comments
• File names of the comprehension test results (self-explanatory)
• Corrected one erroneous automatic evaluation rule in the multiple-choice evaluation (zahradnici_3,
TRUE and FALSE had been swapped)
• Evaluation protocols for both question types added into Folder lifr_formr_study_design
• Data has been cleaned: empty responses to multiple-choice questions were re-inserted. Now, all surveys
are considered complete that have reader’s subjective text evaluation complete (these were placed at
the very end of each survey).
• Only complete surveys (all 7 content questions answered) are represented. We dropped the replies of
six users who did not complete their surveys.
• A few missing responses to open questions have been detected and re-inserted.
• The demographic data contain all respondents who filled in the informed consent and the demographic
details, with respondents who did not complete any test survey (but provided their demographic
details) in a separate file. All other data have been cleaned to contain only responses by the regular
respondents (at least one completed survey).
Corpus of Czech educational texts for readability studies, with paraphrases, measured reading comprehension, and a multi-annotator subjective rating of selected text features based on the Hamburg Comprehensibility Concept
Corpus of Czech educational texts for readability studies, with paraphrases, measured reading comprehension, and a multi-annotator subjective rating of selected text features based on the Hamburg Comprehensibility Concept
Experimental materials, data and R scripts used in the paper "Garden-path sentences and the diversity of their
(mis)representations" (Ceháková - Chromý, 2023).
The ILRB has been created by two cooperating teams - by the team of the Institute of Czech Language, Czech Academy of Sciences and the team of the NLP Centre at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University (2004-2008).
The tool consists of two sections: wordlist and reference (explanatory) one. Comments and remarks are welcome and should be send to the address poradna@ujc.cas.cz.
1. Wordlist section
It contains more than 60 000 dictionary entries and is based on the glossary of the School Rules of Czech Orthography, the Dictionary of the Literary Czech and selected entries from the New Dictionary of Words of Foreign Origin and Dictionary of Neologisms. The entries typically include information that is asked about frequently by the users. Also inflectional forms of the particular words forms are offered in the form of tables thanks to the morphological analyzer ajka created at the Faculty of Informatics, MU. The dictionary part is linked to the explanatory one through the hypertext links.
2. Reference section
It comprises the explanations about linguistic phenomena described in the Rules of Czech Orthography and contemporary Czech grammars, frequently and repeatedly asked by the users turning to the Linguistic Advisory Line in the Institute of Czech Language. In the offered explanations some typical spelling problems are dealt with including the appropriate recommendations. The ILRB is regularly updated and completed, new expressions are added and made more precise. and Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in project 1ET200610406 and Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports in projects LM2010013, LC536 and 2C06009.