International Journal of Learner Corpus Research - Current Issue

This paper tests three hypotheses about written vocabulary in child L2 English. Specifically, as children mature, (1) the mean frequency values of the nouns they use increase; (2) the mean frequencies of other parts-of-speech decrease; (3) the use of academic vocabulary increases only in certain types of writing. Using a corpus of writing by children in Norway, hypothesis 1 was confirmed up to the mid-teenage years. The mean frequency values of nouns then decreased. Analysis showed that the early increase is due to decreased repetition of low-frequency topic words. After age 15, frequencies drop as the main source of vocabulary moves from a region around the 150th most frequent lemma to one around the 550th. Hypotheses 2 and 3 were partially confirmed. Mean frequencies of non-nouns decreased in non-stories after Year 9. Non-stories became more academic across school years. Stories had much lower scores overall but also showed an increase at Year 10.

Mean-frequency scores of lexical sophistication are used to evaluate written and spoken language production. They are calculated using word frequencies extracted from a reference corpus. Using mixed-effects regression models, we analyse the strength of the relationship between L2 proficiency and mean-frequency scores in spoken and written texts using reference corpora representing different modes and registers. We control for task and topic effects. We observe that mean-frequency measures of lexical sophistication are considerably more influenced by the mode and register of the reference corpus used to calculate these scores than by language users’ proficiency level. Advanced language users produce more frequent vocabulary, typical of the target register, in both spoken monologues and written essays. These results provide evidence in favour of a conceptual and terminological shift from lexical sophistication to register appropriateness (as suggested by Durrant & Brenchley, 2019) to refer to the construct captured by mean-frequency scores of vocabulary use.

This study explores the development of L2 phraseological knowledge, focusing on the relationship between L2 proficiency and the use of adjective-noun combinations from the perspective of collocation density and association strength. While a growing body of evidence suggests that more advanced L2 production tends to be characterised by (i) a greater collocation density and (ii) more strongly associated collocations, several studies did not find this trend. The present study draws on the British Council-Lancaster Aptis Corpus and data from four proficiency levels (A2-C of the CEFR) to test a hypothesis about the direction of collocation development in order to contribute to a systematic advancement of knowledge about the development of productive L2 collocation use. The study replicates some of the key findings from previous research, confirming that these trends are generalisable to different samples of L2 speakers and across different modes of communication.

The present study aims to verify previous findings on the role of proficiency in the degree of complexity and accuracy of verbal morphemes in written essays from intermediate and advanced L2 Italian learners. In addition, by taking the perspective of usage-based theories on the distributional properties in the input, it investigates the extent to which contingency affects morphological complexity and accuracy by the emergence of cue-outcome associations. Hypotheses on the effects of contingency and proficiency on complexity and accuracy, and on their mutual relationships, are verified by adopting a confirmatory approach and by using Structural equation modeling. Results support the claims for non-universal mechanisms in the acquisition of verbal morphology: proficiency does not affect the morphological complexity of learner texts in the same way in inflectionally rich and poor languages, and the cue-outcome mechanisms of associative learning work to different extents depending on the inflectional systems of the target languages.

The present study tests the empirical adequacy of competing models of grammatical complexity in university student writing, based on analysis of disciplinary texts from L1-English and L2-English students. The results show that grammatical complexity in student writing must be treated as a multi-dimensional linguistic construct, distinguishing among both structural types and syntactic functions. We compare the results here to previous research (Biber et al., 2024a, b), showing a similar patterning of complexity features in student writing and the broader domain of general writing. Two of these groupings – dependent phrases functioning as noun modifiers, and finite dependent clauses functioning as clause-level constituents – are especially interesting. These two groupings represent the strongest co-occurrence patterns in general writing, but only the dependent clause grouping is represented in student writing. This discrepancy is interpreted relative to the development of advanced proficiency in the use of complexity features by university students.

Previous studies of undergraduate writing investigated linguistic variation across (i) assignment types, (ii) disciplines, and (iii) language backgrounds. The combined findings of these studies allowed us to formulate eight hypotheses as to how undergraduate writing is likely to vary across these three variables. Three of the hypotheses are as follows: (a) writing in humanities will have more features of ‘academic involvement’, while writing in sciences will have more features of ‘information density’; (b) assignments such as proposals and procedural recounts will have more features of ‘expression of possibility’; and (c) L1 students will use more features of ‘information density’ than L2 students. In the current study, we test these hypotheses, examining whether the language of undergraduate writing varies in accordance with the expectations from previous research. We use the dimensions identified in Goulart (2024) to examine these hypotheses in a corpus of undergraduate student writing. The results provide support for hypotheses related to disciplines and communicative purposes, but not for those related to language backgrounds.

Since Paquot (2019), several unresolved issues have persisted regarding the operationalization of phraseological sophistication in L2 complexity research. One of the most crucial concerns relates to the extent to which the commonly used measures of phraseological sophistication (MI scores) fully represent the intended construct. In this study, we draw upon insights from L2 phraseological research to reexamine the conceptualization and operationalization of phraseological sophistication. We conduct new analyses on the learner corpus used in Paquot (2019), using alternative operationalizations of phraseological sophistication that represent different dimensions of sophistication (based on the register specificity of word combinations and their frequency). Results show that measures representing the dimensions of association (MI scores) and register specificity (ratios of academic collocations) correlate with each other. Frequency-based measures, however, pattern very differently, which we attribute to some issues in the way we operationalized frequency of co-occurrence.