Using Letter Positional Probabilities to Assess French Word Complexity
We use Letter Positional Probabilities (LPPs) to examine the orthographic differences between simple and complex French words. We draw from a sample of 38,000 French words scored by reaction time on a lexical decision task. We take the 5000 highest reaction time words and the 5000 lowest as a proxy for high and low word complexity groups respectively. We create 18 variables based on the structure of the words, such as length and number of syllables. We also reduce each word to a string of binary values by one-hot encoding each letter according to the 42 characters of the standard French alphabet up to a length of 25 letters. Thus, each word is represented by 42 x 25 binary characters. We ...
| Authors | Michael Dalvean |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 20 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 October 2026 |
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