K.%20PHILIP%20CHOONG%20and%20ZHAOHONG%20HAN

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Task Complexity and Output ComplexityAn
Exploratory Study

• K. PHILIP CHOONG and ZHAOHONG HAN
• Teachers College, Columbia University
• kpc2001_at_columbia.edu
• han_at_tc.columbia.edu

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Motivation

• Cognition Hypothesis
• Question What is the relationship between task
  complexity and output complexity?
• Is there a relationship between task complexity
  and output complexity?
• If so, what is the nature of the relationship?

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Operationalization of Task Complexity
Dimensions
Dimensions
Dimensions
Dimensions
Dimensions
Dimensions
Dimensions
Dimensions
Contextual support
Contextual support
Contextual support
Contextual support
Contextual support
Contextual support
Reasoning demands
Single/Dual Task
Reasoning demands
Reasoning demands
Single/Dual Task
Reasoning demands
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Task Story narration
-Complex
(C1) picture/sequence
/-picture
(C2) - picture/sequence
Task conditions
(C3) picture/-sequence
/-sequence
(C4) -picture/-sequence
Complex
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Design

• Repeated measures
• Experimental Group
• Comparison Group 1
• Comparison Group 2

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Participants

• Experimental group 10 native Japanese speakers
  from advanced ESL classes in New York City
• Average age 38
• Gender- 9 females and 1 male
• Comparison Group 1 5 native speakers of American
  English
• Average age 33
• All females
• Comparison Group 2 10 native speakers of
  American English

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Procedure

• Task Story narration under 4 different
  conditions
• 4 stories vis-à-vis 4 conditions
• Instructions
• I am going to show you a set of pictures that
  tell a story. Please take as long as you like to
  look over the pictures, then tell me the story as
  if I cannot see the pictures. We will do this
  twice. The first set will be practice, just to
  make sure you understand the instructions. There
  is only one correct story for these pictures.

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Example
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Measures of Output Complexity

• Syntactic complexity
• of T-units per narration
• Content complexity
• of idea units per narration

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Analysis and Results Experimental group

• Friedman Test and Kendalls W Test of Mean rank
• Both produced same results, significant at .05
  level
• Friedman Test of Mean Rank (Kendalls test
  similar)

Condition Mean Rank C1_T-unit
2.45 C2_T-unit
2.00 C3_T-unit 5.15 C4_T-unit
3.90 C1_I-unit
4.55 C2_I-unit 4.25 C3_I-unit
7.55 C4_I-unit 6.15
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Results- Form Complexity

• Condition 3 (reasoning demands, contextual
  support) most complex
• Condition 2 (-Reasoning demands, -contextual
  support)
• Least complex, least variation
• Condition 4 (Reasoning demands, -contextual
  support) shows most variation

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Results-Content complexity

• Greater variation in content complexity than in
  form complexity
• In line with Friedmans and Kendalls W tests of
  mean rank.
• Also supported by paired sample t-test

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Results paired samples t-test
Contrast t-value df Sig. (2-tailed)
C1_T - C3_T -3.160 9 .012
C2_T - C3_T -4.371 9 .002
C2_T - C4_T -2.785 9 .021
C1_I - C3_I -2.918 9 .017
C2_I - C3_I -6.050 9 .000
C2_I - C4_I -2.293 9 .048

• Significant differences between conditions 1 and
  3, 2 and 3, and 2 and 4
• Both for Form complexity (t-units) and for
  content complexity (idea units)

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Results individual

• Greater number of idea units may suggest that
  participant was more focused on content than form.

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Results-Comparison Group 1

• Native speaker results are parallel to non-native
  speaker results in terms of

Syntactic/Content Complexity
C3gtC4gtC1gtC2
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Results Comparison Group 2

• Rankings of difficulty of picture sets

C3gtC4gtC1gtC2
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Discussion
Finding 1 More complex conditions produce more
complex output.
C3
C4
contextual support reasoning demands
-contextual support reasoning demands
Reasoning demands
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Discussion

• Finding 2 Gap between the contrived complexity
  order and the observed order of output
  complexity

Task Internal complexity
/-picture
/-sequence
Contrived complexity C4gtC3gtC2gtC1 Observed
complexity of linguistic outputC3gtC4gtC1gtC2 Task
intrinsic complexity C3gtC4gtC1gtC2
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Discussion

• Finding 3 Patterns of variation differ for the
  experimental group vs. comparison group 1.
• Experimental group
• Syntactic complexity C4 C2
• Content complexity C1 C2
• Comparison group 1
• Syntactic complexity C1 C2
• Content complexity C4 C2
• Content complexity and form complexity are
  unequal.

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Limitations and Next Steps

• Further data analysis
• Fluency as well as accuracy
• Lexical complexity
• Syntactic complexity in terms of S-nodes per
  T-unit

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Conclusion

• The jury is still out.
• Task complexity is a complex notion requiring
  finer-grained analysis than has generally been
  given. More conceptual work is needed.
• In examining the relationship between task
  complexity and output complexity, there is a
  need to differentiate between content complexity
  and form complexity, and more importantly, to
  investigate how attention is allocated to form
  and content during task performance.
• There is a need to track down the differential
  impact of task-intrinsic complexity and contrived
  complexity
• More attention should be given to task-intrinsic
  complexity

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Conclusion

• Grading
• Complexity and difficulty
• Complexity dimensions
• Granular analysis of complexity (e.g.,
  conceptualizer, formulator, and articulator)
• Effect size
• Perceptions of complexity