Assessing linguistic complexity and register flexibility in advanced second language learners

Abstract

Abstract The aim of the present study is twofold: (1) to assess the degree of register flexibility in advanced second language (L2) learners of English and (2) to determine whether and to what extent this flexibility is impacted by inter-individual variability in experiential factors and personality traits. Register flexibility is quantitatively measured as the degree of differentiation in the use of linguistic complexity – gauged by a range of lexical, syntactic, and information-theoretic complexity measures – across three writing tasks. At the methodological level, we aim to demonstrate how a corpus-based approach combined with natural language processing (NLP) techniques and a within-subjects design can be a valuable complement to experimental approaches to language adaptation.