This study compares the diversity (number of types) and sophistication (PMI) of adjectival modifier (adjective + noun) and direct object (verb + noun) relations between oral and written tasks completed over a period of 21-months. In general, written tasks were found to be more phraseologically complex than spoken tasks and productions at the end of the study period were found to be slightly more phraseologically sophisticated as compared to productions at the beginning. However the developmental trends differed across tasks, highlighting the important role that task characteristics play in measures of phraseological complexity.
Recent research has begun to provide evidence for the important role of phraseological complexity in raters' perceptions of advanced L2 writing proficiency (Paquot, 2019; Rubin, Housen, & Paquot, 2021; Vandeweerd, Housen, & Paquot, in press). Until now however, research in this domain has focused almost exclusively on the written mode and no study thus far has compared phraseological complexity across modes. This is important because as shown by Biber, Conrad and Cortes (2004), the type and number of phraseological units can differ substantially between oral and written texts. In this presentation, we report on a study comparing the development of phraseological complexity across three tasks: written argumentative essays, oral narratives and oral interviews, conducted over the span of 21-months (The LANGSNAP Corpus, Mitchell, Tracy-Ventura, & McManus, 2017). Phraseological sophistication is operationalized as the diversity (number of types) and sophistication (PMI) of adjectival modifier (adjective + noun) and direct object (verb + noun) relations. The results showed that, in general, written tasks were more phraseologically complex than spoken tasks and that productions at the end of the study period were slightly more phraseologically sophisticated as compared to productions at the beginning. However, the developmental trends differed across tasks, thus highlighting the important role that task characteristics play in measures of phraseological complexity.
