Factors Affecting Grammatical and Lexical Complexity of Long‐Term L2 Speakers’ Oral Proficiency
Cornelia Lahmann is now at the Mercator‐Institut für Sprachförderung und Deutsch als Zweitsprache, University of Cologne. This research was financed by the Dutch national research foundation (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek), Grant number 360‐70‐420. We are greatly indebted to all the student assistants involved in the transcription and rating process and we are grateful to Martijn Wieling for helping us with the statistics. We have also benefited from the fruitful discussions with Alex Housen and Bram Bulté. Thanks to Scott Crossley and Kristopher Kyle we were able to generate additional lexical measures. Finally, we would also like to thank the following archives for granting us the permission to use their oral history testimony data: University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute (Los Angeles), Werkstatt der Erinnerungen (Hamburg), Alte Synagoge (Essen), Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies (Yale University Library), Tauber Holocaust Library and Education Program (San Francisco), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, DC), and the Association of Jewish Refugees (London). The manuscript is based on data previously published in a doctoral dissertation.
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.
Number of times cited: 4
- Lourdes Ortega, Ontologies of language, Second Language Acquisition, and world Englishes, World Englishes, 37, 1, (64-79), (2018).
- , , (2018)., The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingualism
- Tuğba Karayayla and Monika S. Schmid, First Language Attrition as a Function of Age at Onset of Bilingualism: First Language Attainment of Turkish–English Bilinguals in the United Kingdom, Language Learning, , (2018).
- Javier Bravo‐Agapito, Claire Frances Bonilla and Isaac Seoane, Data mining in foreign language learning, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, e1287, (2018).
