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Article published In: Cumulative Knowledge Building in Learner Corpus Research
Edited by Tove Larsson and Douglas Biber
[International Journal of Learner Corpus Research 11:1] 2025
► pp. 114–144

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Complexity and accuracy of verbal morphology in written L2 Italian

The role of proficiency and contingency

ORCiD logo with link | Università per Stranieri di Perugia
Published online: 18 October 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijlcr.23032.spi
Abstract
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Complexity
    • 2.2Accuracy
    • 2.3Contingency
  • 3.Verbal morphology in L2 Italian
  • 4.The present study
    • 4.1Data, method and descriptive statistics
    • 4.2Analysis and results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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2025. The Construction Complexity Calculator (ConPlex): A tool for calculating Nelson’s (2024) construction-based complexity measure. Research in Corpus Linguistics 13:2 ► pp. 124 ff. DOI logo
R. Cooper, Christopher
2025. The Construction Complexity Calculator (ConPlex): A tool for calculating Nelson’s (2024) construction-based complexity measure. Research in Corpus Linguistics 13:2 ► pp. 124 ff. DOI logo
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2025. A Different View of Phraseological Complexity: The Role of Density, Diversity and Distance. Journal of the European Second Language Association 9:1 ► pp. 36 ff. DOI logo

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