5 Phraseological Complexity as an Index of L2 Dutch Writing Proficiency: A Partial Replication Study

Assessing spoken lexical and lexicogrammatical proficiency using features of word, bigram, and dependency bigram use

“…These results add to the growing number of studies that highlight the importance of measuring productive lexical and lexicogrammatical proficiency as a multivariate construct (Eguchi & Kyle, 2020; Kim et al., 2018; Kyle et al., 2018). It also supports previous L2 writing studies that have shown the utility of using dependency bigram indices to model productive proficiency (Kyle & Eguchi, 2021; Paquot, 2018; Rubin et al., 2021). Unlike Kyle and Eguchi (2021), however, which indicated that contiguous bigram indices were less predictive than dependency bigrams (and contributed little explained variance to models that included dependency bigrams), this study suggests that (at least for OPI data), both bigram types explain a substantial amount of variance and provide complementary information regarding language use.…”

“…Dependency bigram indices demonstrated small to moderate correlations with OPI scores. The correlations indicated that more proficient speakers tended to use more strongly associated noun-adjective (r = 0.116) and verb-subject (r = 0.461) combinations, which is generally in line with recent related research using written samples (Kyle & Eguchi, 2021;Paquot, 2018;Rubin et al, 2021). However, the current study found a weaker relationship between noun-adjective SOA scores and proficiency scores and a much stronger relationship between verb-subject SOA than previous writing studies (Kyle & Eguchi, 2021).…”

“…Each word in a sentence has a syntactic head, but may have many children (e.g., a direct object has a verb as its head, but may have a determiner, adjective, and/or relative clause as its children). Dependency parses have been used to examine the use of verbs within particular argument structure constructions (Kyle & Crossley, 2017; O'Donnell & Ellis, 2010; Römer et al., 2015) and, more recently, to examine collocations between words in particular grammatical relationships (Kyle & Eguchi, 2021; Paquot, 2018; Rubin et al., 2021). Generally, these studies support the notion that more proficient L2 users tend to use word combinations that are more strongly associated than less proficient users.…”

“…Research on the relationship between proficiency and collocation use has generally indicated that more proficient language users tend to use more strongly associated word combinations than less proficient users. Although some research has focused on the degree to which L2 language users produce particular collocations (Durrant & Schmitt, 2009), much of the recent research has focused on n ‐gram collocations (Bestgen & Granger, 2014; Eguchi & Kyle, 2020; Garner et al., 2019) and syntactic dependency collocations (Kyle & Eguchi, 2021; Paquot, 2018; Rubin et al., 2021).…”

Proficiency at the lexis–grammar interface: Comparing oral versus written French exam tasks

“…Phraseological sophistication, on the contrary, refers to the extent to which a learner is able to select more specific or informative phraseological units (i.e., those which may be more appropriate to a specific topic or register). In a series of studies focusing on second language (L2) English, French, and Dutch, measures of phraseological complexity have been found to be predictive of L2 proficiency, even when lexical and syntactic complexity measures were not (Paquot, 2018(Paquot, , 2019Rubin et al, 2021;Vandeweerd et al, 2021). While these studies speak to the relevance of phraseological complexity to L2 proficiency in general, they are limited by the fact that they have focused exclusively on written production.…”