This article critically scrutinizes a number of issues involved in the definition and operationalization of CAF constructs. It argues for maintaining clearer distinctions between CAF on the one hand and notions such as linguistic development and communicative adequacy on the other. Adequacy, in particular, should be considered both as a separate performance dimension and as a way of interpreting CAF measures. The notions of complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) have been employed in a number of studies on the acquisition and use of a second language, although they do not constitute a theory or a research program in themselves. They are dimensions for describing language performance, most frequently used as dependent variables to assess variation with respect to independent variables such as acquisitional level or task features. CAF measures can also be used to describe performance by native speakers or first language learners. Each of these constructs has been operationalized in various ways and the articles in this issue bear witness to this lively methodological debate. Researchers agree on the usefulness and validity of the constructs, but they also agree that they should be further specified and that they don't exhaust performance description.
Although a growing number of second language acquisition (SLA) studies take linguistic complexity as a dependent variable, the term is still poorly defined and often used with different meanings, thus posing serious problems for research synthesis and knowledge accumulation. This article proposes a simple, coherent view of the construct, which is defined in a purely structural way, i.e. the complexity directly arising from the number of linguistic elements and their interrelationships. Issues of cognitive cost (difficulty) or developmental dynamics (acquisition) are explicitly excluded from this theoretical definition and its operationalization. The article discusses how the complexity of an interlanguage system can be assessed based on the limited samples SLA researchers usually work with. For the areas of morphology, syntax and the lexicon, some measures are proposed which are coherent with the purely structural view advocated, and issues related to their operationalization are critically scrutinized
Morphological complexity (MC) is a relatively new construct in second language acquisition\ud (SLA). After critically discussing existing approaches to calculating MC in first- and second-\ud language acquisition research, this article presents a new operationalization of the construct,\ud the Morphological Complexity Index (MCI). The MCI is applied in two case studies based\ud on argumentative written texts produced by native and non-native speakers of Italian and\ud English. Study 1 shows that morphological complexity varies between native and non-native\ud speakers of Italian, and that it is significantly lower in learners with lower proficiency levels.\ud The MCI is strongly correlated to proficiency, measured with a C-test, and also shows\ud significant correlations with other measures of linguistic complexity, such as lexical diversity\ud and sentence length. Quite a different picture emerges from Study 2, on advanced English\ud learners. Here, morphological complexity remains constant across natives and non-natives, and\ud is not significantly correlated to other text complexity measures. These results point to the fact\ud that morphological complexity in texts is a function of speakers’ proficiency and the specific\ud language under investigation; for some linguistic systems with a relatively simple inflectional\ud morphology, such as English, learners will soon reach a threshold level after which inflectional\ud diversity remains constant
Although acquisition criteria are a fundamental issue for SLA research, they have not always been adequately defined or elaborated in the literature. This article critically scrutinizes one such criterion, the emergence criterion, proposing an explicit, operational definition. After discussing emergence as a theoretical construct, the article addresses several points involved in its operationalization. These points concern all stages of a research project, from data collection to data organization and analysis. A concrete example is provided, leading to the formulation of an emergence criterion for the acquisition of two grammatical structures of Italian as a second language. Issues of reliability and validity are also discussed, providing indications for future research.
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