Search results for "semantic complexity"
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The facilitative effect of gestures on the neural processing of semantic complexity in a continuous narrative
2019
© 2019 Elsevier Inc. Gestures are elemental components of social communication and aid comprehension of verbal messages; however, little is known about the potential role of gestures in facilitating processing of semantic complexity in an ecologically valid setting. The goal of this study was to investigate whether cognitive load, as indexed by semantic complexity, is modulated by the presentation of gestures accompanying speech. Twenty healthy participants watched 16 video clips of a short narrative while instructed to carefully listen to and watch the narrator while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were acquired. The videos contained passages with and without various co-s…
Semantic Complexity in Natural Language
2015
This chapter presents the technical framework that the authors used to define fragments of natural languages and formulate questions as to their semantic complexity. It examines the study of the classical syllogistic and its extensions. It analyzes the semantic complexity of various salient fragments of English. It highlights that the language of argument, featuring transitive verbs, is in an objective sense inferentially no more complex than the language of classical syllogisms exemplified by argument, indeed, the analogous extension featuring ditransitive verbs involves only a modest increase in complexity. On the other hand, the language of argument, which adds relative clauses to the cl…