Towards measuring lexical complexity in Malayalam
This paper proposes a metric to quantify lexical complexity in Malayalam. The met- ric utilizes word frequency, orthography and morphology as the three factors affect- ing visual word recognition in Malayalam. Malayalam differs from other Indian lan- guages due to its agglutinative morphology and orthography, which are incorporated into our model. The predictions made by our model are then evaluated against reac- tion times in a lexical decision task. We find that reaction times are predicted by frequency, morphological complexity and script complexity. We also explore the interactions between morphological com- plexity with frequency and script in our results. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on lexical complexity in Malayalam.
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