This chapter takes a critical look at complexity in L2 research. We demonstrate several problems in the L2 literature in terms of how complexity has been defined and operationalised as a construct. In the first part of the chapter we try to unravel its highly complex, multidimensional nature by presenting a taxonomic model that identifies major…

We report the results from two eye-movement monitoring experiments examining the processing of reflexive pronouns by proficient German-speaking learners of second language (L2) English. Our results show that the nonnative speakers initially tried to link English argument reflexives to a discourse-prominent but structurally inaccessible antecedent,…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine the performance of adolescents with acquired brain injury (ABI) during a spoken persuasive discourse task. Persuasive discourse is frequently used in social and academic settings and is of importance in the study of adolescent language. Method: Participants included 8 adolescents with ABI and 8 peers…

This paper investigates early productivity of morpheme use in Hungarian children aged between 2 ; 1 and 5 ; 3. Hungarian has a rich morphology which is the core marker of grammatical functions. A new method is introduced using the novel word paradigm in a sentence repetition task with masked inflections (i.e. a disguised elicited production task).…

This study examined morphological skills in a girl with cri du chat syndrome, addressing three questions: (1) To what extent does the subject inflect words? (2) To what extent are words inflected correctly? (3) To what extent do the inflected words reflect productive morphological rules, and to what extent can they be considered to be…

This study investigates phenomena that have been claimed to be indicative of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in German, focusing on subject-verb agreement marking. Longitudinal data from fourteen German-speaking children with SLI, seven monolingual and seven Turkish-German successive bilingual children, were examined. We found similar patterns…

Background: Structural language anomalies or impairments in autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) are theoretically and practically important, although underrecognised as such. This review aims to highlight the ubiquitousness of structural language anomalies and impairments in ASD, and to stimulate investigation of their immediate causes and…

Hungarian is a language with morphological case marking and relatively free word order. These typological characteristics make it a good ground for testing the crosslinguistic validity of theories on processing sentences with relative clauses. Our study focused on effects of structural factors and processing capacity. We tested 43 typically…

The present study builds upon research in the CAF (complexity, accuracy, fluency) framework for examining learner performance to compare the lexical and syntactic complexity of learner output in spoken discourse and synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) during completion of narrative tasks. Data were generated from transcripts and…

Much recent work argues that lexical frequency plays a central explanatory role in linguistic theory, but the status, predicted effects, and methodological treatment of frequency are controversial, especially so in the less-investigated area of syntactic variation. This article addresses these issues in a case study of lexical frequency effects on…

Purpose: This study investigated the role of processing complexity of verbal working memory tasks in predicting spoken sentence comprehension in typically developing children. Of interest was whether simple and more complex working memory tasks have similar or different power in predicting sentence comprehension. Method: Sixty-five children (6- to…

Kurtop is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by approximately 15,000 people in Northeastern Bhutan. This dissertation is the first descriptive grammar of the language, based on extensive fieldwork and community-driven language documentation in Bhutan. When possible, analyses are presented in typological and historical/comparative perspectives and…

The present paper introduces and evaluates a readability measurement method designed for learners of EFL (English as a foreign language). The proposed readability measurement method (a regression model) estimates the text readability based on linguistic features, such as lexical, syntactic and discourse features. Text readability refers to the…

This sociolinguistic-variationist investigation sheds light on two little-studied issues concerning Spanish DOM, or variable use of a before animate "direct objects" (DOs), in vernacular language: the complex interaction of co-occurring linguistic (type of verb; definiteness, specificity, grammatical number, topicality, type and…

Dynamic and interactive uses of personal pronouns are usually not as neat as traditional grammar describes in that the first and second person pronoun index speakers and addressees in a speech event. Devoted to a prevalent feature of Mandarin Chinese conversation--the switch of the first person singular pronoun "wo", "I", and the second person…