@InProceedings{gala-ziegler:2016:CL4LC,
  author    = {Gala, Nuria  and  Ziegler, Johannes},
  title     = {Reducing lexical complexity as a tool to increase text accessibility for children with dyslexia},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC)},
  month     = {December},
  year      = {2016},
  address   = {Osaka, Japan},
  publisher = {The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee},
  pages     = {59--66},
  abstract  = {Lexical complexity plays a central role in readability, particularly for
	dyslexic children and poor readers because of their slow and laborious decoding
	and word recognition skills. Although some features to aid readability may be
	common to most languages (e.g., the majority of 'easy' words are of low
	frequency), we believe that lexical complexity is mainly language-specific. In
	this paper, we define lexical complexity for French and we present a pilot
	study on the effects of text simplification in dyslexic children. The
	participants were asked to read out loud original and manually simplified
	versions of a standardized French text corpus and to answer comprehension
	questions after reading each text. The analysis of the results shows that the
	simplifications performed were beneficial in terms of reading speed and they
	reduced the number of reading errors (mainly lexical ones) without a loss in
	comprehension. Although the number of participants in this study was rather
	small (N=10), the results are
	promising and contribute to the development of applications in computational
	linguistics.},
  url       = {http://aclweb.org/anthology/W16-4107}
}