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Lexico-Syntactic Complexity in Grok 4-Generated and Human-Written Essays: Implications for Writing | ||
| Interdisciplinary Studies in English Language Teaching | ||
| دوره 4، شماره 2 - شماره پیاپی 8، 2026، صفحه 204-222 اصل مقاله (501.39 K) | ||
| نوع مقاله: Original Article | ||
| شناسه دیجیتال (DOI): 10.22080/iselt.2026.32081.1201 | ||
| نویسندگان | ||
| Farzad Mahmoudi Largani1؛ Hooshang Khoshsima* 2 | ||
| 1PhD Candidate, English Department, Chabahar Maritime University, Chabahar, Iran | ||
| 2Professor, English Department, Chabahar Maritime University, Chabahar, Iran | ||
| تاریخ دریافت: 20 خرداد 1405، تاریخ بازنگری: 21 تیر 1405، تاریخ پذیرش: 25 تیر 1405 | ||
| چکیده | ||
| An increasing number of studies examining Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated writing have produced conflicting findings, which is largely due to simplistic complexity measures and an overreliance on a single AI model. This study investigated differences in lexico-syntactic complexity between AI-generated and human-written argumentative essays under controlled conditions. Seventy International English Language Testing System (IELTS) Writing Task 2 essays were analyzed, comprising 35 written by Iranian English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners and 35 generated by Grok 4, all responding to identical prompts targeting IELTS Band 8. Lexical and syntactic complexity were measured using Lu’s (2010) framework through the Lexical Complexity Analyzer (LCA) and the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (L2SCA). Independent-samples t-tests with Bonferroni adjustments revealed that Grok 4 essays demonstrated significantly higher lexical diversity, sentence-level complexity, and coordination-based syntactic complexity, whereas human essays exhibited greater lexical variation across parts of speech. No significant differences emerged in length-based, dependent-clause, or phrasal complexity. These findings show AI’s structural elaboration and human writers' lexical flexibility, highlighting the pedagogical value of AI-generated essays as contrastive models for syntactic revision and lexical refinement in argumentative writing. | ||
| کلیدواژهها | ||
| Artificial Intelligence؛ Grok 4؛ Lexical Complexity؛ Syntactic Complexity؛ Essays | ||
| مراجع | ||
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