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Finding variation: assessing the development of syntactic complexity in ESL Speech
Author(s) -
Vercellotti Mary Lou
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
international journal of applied linguistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.712
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1473-4192
pISSN - 0802-6106
DOI - 10.1111/ijal.12225
Subject(s) - variation (astronomy) , subordination (linguistics) , variety (cybernetics) , construct (python library) , linguistics , computer science , linguistic sequence complexity , psychology , artificial intelligence , philosophy , physics , astrophysics , programming language
This paper examines the development and variation of syntactic complexity in the speech of 66 L2 learners over three academic semesters in an intensive English program. This investigation tracked development using hierarchical linear modeling with three commonly‐used, recommended measures of productive complexity (i.e., length of AS‐unit, clause length, subordination) and three exploratory measures of structural complexity (i.e., syntactic variety, weighted complexity scores, frequency of nonfinite clauses) to capture different aspects of syntactic complexity. All measures showed growth over time, suggesting that learners are not forced to prioritize certain aspects of the construct at the expense of others (i.e., no trade‐off effects) across development. The unexplained significant variation found in these data differed among the measures reinforcing notions of multidimensionality of linguistic complexity.