The study analyzes lexical and morphological complexity in texts written by first and third year university German and Spanish learners of Italian. Results show an interplay of developmental level, L1-L2 typological distance and lexical and morphological complexity. Theoretical and methodological implications for the cross-linguistic measurement of interlanguage complexity are discussed.
This study analyzes texts written by first and third year university learners of L2 Italian, with Spanish and German as L1s. The variables investigated are morphological complexity (Pallotti 2015; Brezina & Pallotti, 2019) and lexical complexity, operationalized as the Moving Average Type-Token Ratio (MATTR, Covington & McFall, 2010). Preliminary analyses show that lexical and morphological complexity are higher in the texts produced by Spanish-speaking beginner learners. However, these values remain constant in more advanced Spanish speakers, while complexity increases in the more advanced L1 German group. Furthermore, the correlation between morphological and lexical complexity is stronger in German-speaking participants than in Spanish-speaking ones. These results may be explained in terms of typological distance between languages. The typological proximity of Italian and Spanish allows Spanish-speaking beginner learners to produce a relatively wide range of lexical types and morphological exponences from the start, using positive transfer from their L1. Although such transfers do not always lead to target-like L2 structures, these learners are nonetheless able to experiment with a larger repertoire of words and inflectional processes. German speakers, on the other hand, have to reconstruct the L2 lexicon and grammar essentially from scratch, so that initially they will have a rather limited range of lexical and inflectional morphemes, which gradually expands over time. This may also explain the stronger correlation between lexical and morphological complexity in this group. These results show how L1/L2 typological distance may play a role in the development of lexical and morphological complexity (De Clercq, 2015; De Clercq & Housen, 2019), and raise a number of theoretical and methodological issues about the cross-linguistic measurement of interlanguage complexity.
