Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A reading skill test to diagnose basic language skills is introduced. The test is designed to measure six component skills relevant to reading in comparison with those of state-of- the-art natural language processing technologies. The results of the first large-scale experiments using the test are reported. Surprisingly, almost half of Japanese junior high school students do no better than machines in dependency analysis. More than half of 7th grade students do no better than making random choices on questions involving inferences and definition understanding.