Abstract
Morphological complexity (MC) is a relatively new construct in second language acquisition (SLA). After critically discussing existing approaches to calculating MC in first- and second-language acquisition research, this article presents a new operationalization of the construct, the Morphological Complexity Index (MCI). The MCI is applied in two case studies based on argumentative written texts produced by native and non-native speakers of Italian and English. Study 1 shows that morphological complexity varies between native and non-native speakers of Italian, and that it is significantly lower in learners with lower proficiency levels. The MCI is strongly correlated to proficiency, measured with a C-test, and also shows significant correlations with other measures of linguistic complexity, such as lexical diversity and sentence length. Quite a different picture emerges from Study 2, on advanced English learners. Here, morphological complexity remains constant across natives and non-natives, and is not significantly correlated to other text complexity measures. These results point to the fact that morphological complexity in texts is a function of speakers’ proficiency and the specific language under investigation; for some linguistic systems with a relatively simple inflectional morphology, such as English, learners will soon reach a threshold level after which inflectional diversity remains constant.
Highlights
Morphological complexity (MC) is a relatively new construct in second language (L2) studies
The correlation between MCI calculated with 10-verb samples (MC10) and C-test results by non-native speaker (NNS) is strong, as can be seen in Figure 2 (r = 0.759, p < 0.001, 95% CI [0.584, 0.867])
Our findings show that the Morphological Complexity Index (MCI) reflects both the complexity of the verbal inflectional system in a particular target language (Italian and English) as well as the realized complexity of L2 and L1 texts, which may be related to individual stylistic choices and L2 proficiency
Summary
Morphological complexity (MC) is a relatively new construct in second language (L2) studies. Most research in second language acquisition (SLA) to date has focused on lexical and syntactic complexity (for a review, see Bulté and Housen, 2012, who report that only six studies out of 40 included morphological complexity measures) Despite this lack of attention to MC in SLA – which may be explained by a prevailing focus on English, a language with few inflectional resources – MC plays a crucial role in a full and theoretically adequate description of the language learning process (De Clercq and Housen, this issue). This means reconstructing highly complex abstract systems, which may take many years, with a number of intermediate stages, characterized by partial and unstable representations of the target grammar (Slabakova 2009)
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