Open AccessStudy on the Correlation between Linguistic Complexity and Audience Recognition in College English Speech Contests
Author(s) -
Lin Shi
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
bcp social sciences and humanities
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2692-6172
DOI - 10.54691/bcpssh.v14i.262
Subject(s) - contest , college english , linguistics , ranking (information retrieval) , rhetoric , psychology , computer science , artificial intelligence , political science , philosophy , law
From the perspective of linguistic complexity, this paper explores the correlation between linguistic complexity and audience recognition in college English speech contests. By adopting the corpus construction and computer visualized data analysis, this study analyzes the speech of contestants at different levels in FLTRP Cup National English peaking Contest 2019-2020, the most authoritative college English speech contest in China. The study shows that: 1) In college English speech contests, the lexical complexity of the speech is negatively correlated with the recognition degree of the audience (i.e. the final ranking of the competition or the success of the speech). 2) The syntactic complexity of the speech exists reasonable interval to ensure good audience recognition. 3) In college English speech contests, the correlation between the lexical complexity and syntactic complexity of speeches and audience recognition is similar to the correlation between the rhetoric and audience recognition in political speeches which is obtained by previous researchers in the field of political speeches. Therefore, we think this study has a certain practical value. It provides evidence of linguistic complexity for predicting the winner of college English speech contests and helping contestants prepare for the contest better.