Factors Affecting Grammatical and Lexical Complexity of Long‐Term L2 Speakers’ Oral Proficiency

Abstract

There remains considerable disagreement about which factors drive second language (L2) ultimate attainment. Age of onset (AO) appears to be a robust factor, lending support to theories of maturational constraints on L2 acquisition. The present study is an investigation of factors that influence grammatical and lexical complexity at the stage of L2 ultimate attainment. Grammatical and lexical complexity were assessed in 102 spontaneous oral interviews. Interviewees’ AOs ranged from 7 to 17 years old. Multifactorial analyses yielded consistently significant effects of gender and level of education for grammatical and lexical complexity. Additionally, native language use at work was a significant predictor for lexical complexity; conversely, AO did not emerge as a significant factor. We conclude that grammatical and lexical complexity at the stage of L2 ultimate attainment is the result of a complex interplay of variables that are general to language learning and performance rather than L2 specific. Open Practices This article has been awarded an Open Materials badge. All materials are publicly accessible in the IRIS digital repository at http://www.iris-database.org. Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science: https://osf.io/tvyxz/wiki.

First Language Attrition as a Function of Age at Onset of Bilingualism: First Language Attainment of Turkish–English Bilinguals in the United Kingdom

“…These nonfinite clauses had been revealed to occur least frequently in heritage Turkish by Treffers-Daller et al (2007). Adapting recent L2 acquisition methodologies that have used similar measures to approximate structural complexity (Lahmann, Steinkrauss, & Schmid, 2016), we z transformed the subscales and then incorporated them into one single measure of structural complexity by using the reshape package in R (Wickham, 2007). We standardized the final scale by z transforming it one more time.…”

Ontologies of language, Second Language Acquisition, and world Englishes

“…In world Englishes the question of timing is deemed irrelevant. In Second Language Acquisition, timing and the focus on understanding ‘late‐timed’ bilingualism has translated into a central preoccupation with comparisons of child‐onset and adult‐onset learners, age effects, and hypothesized critical periods (although we may be witnessing the beginning of a deep rebalancing of biological versus experiential variables in this domain, see for example Kinsella & Singleton, ; Lahmann, Steinkrauss, & Schmid, ; Muñoz, ; Pfenninger & Singleton, ). The ‘additive’ dimension means that the individual speaker is already functioning comfortably in at least one other language; thus, the object of study is bi‐ or multilingualism, since L2 learning by definition involves an expected end outcome of functional competence in two or more languages.…”

Measuring linguistic complexity in long‐term L2 speakers of English and L1 attriters of German

“…No control group was taken into consideration due to the practical limitations of finding a comparable control group that would have experienced similarly severe conditions (see Lahmann, Steinkrauss, & M.S. Schmid, ).…”

“…While these data are usually a source for historians, for linguists they offer a wealth of spontaneous language (Schiffrin, ; M. S. Schmid, ). For more information regarding the current corpus, see Lahmann et al ().…”

“…S. Schmid, 2002). For more information regarding the current corpus, seeLahmann et al (2016).4.2.2 | Data processing procedureData generation took place in three steps: transcription, annotation, and generation of raw data. Each interview was transcribed until a total length of about 1,800 words was reached.…”