初心者レベルの英語学習者の統語複雑さの測定

抄録

　　Recent second language acquisition research calls for establishing more multidimensional definitions of syntactic complexity, which has traditionally been measured almost exclusively in terms of subordination. From the perspective of the cognition mode of cognitive linguistics, the current study aims to investigate whether defining clausal complexity through verb arguments works to gauge syntactic development of beginner-level learners of English. Fifty-six students in a remedial high-school English course engaged in picture-elicited narrative writing at the beginning and at the end of the course. In addition, the narrative data was collected as a baseline from undergraduate English majors (EMs) (n = 18) and native speakers (NSs) of English (n = 16). We then calculated the mean number of arguments per verb as syntactic complexity and compared the three groups. We also examined whether the high-school group improved by means of the paired-samples t-test. The high-school group exhibited a significantly lower mean and greater variability (M = 0.98, SD = 0.46 at the beginning of the course) than the EMs (M = 1.87, SD = 0.11) and the NSs (M = 1.98, SD = 0.07). The scores of the high-school group had increased significantly (p = .000, r = .66) by the end of the course. These results suggest that the verb-argument index may be a sensitive measure of early syntactic development.