Syntactic modification at early stages of L2 German writing development: A longitudinal learner corpus study

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThis study explores ab initio development of syntactic complexity in a longitudinal corpus of learner German writing from a Dynamic Usage-Based perspective. It contributes to the research on L2 writing complexity by focusing on beginning learners of an L2 other than English (German) and on fine-grained measures of syntactic complexity, operationally defined here as syntactic modification.The results show that not only ubiquitous global measures of syntactic complexity but also more specific measures, namely frequencies of syntactic modifiers, can serve as developmental indices at beginning L2 proficiency levels. The learners in this study modified their writing from the very onset of language study and the overall size and range of the modification system did not significantly change over four semesters. However, its composition changed continuously and reflected non-linear waxing and waning of different modifier categories. The study confirmed some results from previous crosssectional research showing that interlanguage development is characterized by a decrease in cognitively easier (e.g., uninflected) categories and an increase in cognitively more difficult (e.g., inflected and clausal) categories. The high variability that was found along with uniform group trends demonstrates the necessity of simultaneous investigations of linguistic development in groups and individuals.

Syntactic complexity in L2 writing: Individual pathways and emerging group trends

“…More recently, L2 complexity, and its development over time, have also been studied for their own sake (i.e. as primary research foci), particularly by studies couched in usage-based theories of SLA or those adopting a dynamic systems theory (DST) approach (Larsen-Freeman, 2006;Spoelman & Verspoor, 2010;Verspoor, Lowie, & van Dijk, 2008;Verspoor, Schmidt, & Xu, 2012;Verspoor & Van Dijk, 2012;Vyatkina, 2012Vyatkina, , 2013Vyatkina, Hirschmann, & Golcher, 2015). These studies suggest that although the complexity of L2 learners' performance increases along with their overall L2 proficiency as time and L2 development proceed, linguistic complexity and proficiency do not always increase in parallel and the increase in complexity is neither linear, constant nor guaranteed for all layers (lexical, morphological, syntactic) and sub-dimensions (e.g.…”

Variation in syntactic complexity: Introduction

“…These overall measures have, however, increasingly become the object of criticism. Moreover, it appears questionable that the entire L2 developmental process could be captured as a linear growth in complexity, in terms of global length measures and subordination ratios (Alexopoulou, Michel, Murakami, & Detmar, ; Bardovi‐Harlig, ; Michel, ; Ortega, ; Pallotti, ; Ravid & Berman, ; Spoelman & Verspoor, ; Vyatkina, ; Vyatkina et al, ). Therefore, other measures of syntactic complexity, which may reveal syntactic development at different levels of proficiency, should be applied as well.…”

“…An important concern of this strand of research is how syntactic complexity develops over time, in relation to accuracy and fluency, and in relation to lexical and morphological complexity. As an independent or primary research variable, syntactic complexity has been the focus of research in a number of studies (Bulté & Housen, 2014;Kyle & Crossley, 2018;Spada & Tomita, 2010), or specifically, in studies that adopted a Dynamic Systems or Usage-based perspective (Spoelman & Verspoor, 2010;Vyatkina, 2012;Vyatkina, Hirschmann, & Golcher, 2015).…”

Typological structure as a Model to Study Languages in Contrast

“…The implementation of the aforementioned studies and other works in the same field the efficiency of linguistic complexity measures while creating readability classification of texts in specific language (Hancke et al, 2012) with accuracy of almost 90% or classifying different age groups (Vajala & Meurers, 2014) with accuracy of 95,9%. Age groups and linguistic complexity are also under study in some methodological researches and interlinguistic studies (Paradis, et al, 2017).…”