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Article published In: Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 32:1 (2019) ► pp.125–154

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Medidas de longitud en la investigación empírica de ASL

¿Medidas de complejidad sintáctica o de fluidez?

 | Universidad Antonio de Nebrija
 | Universidad de Siena | Universidad Antonio de Nebrija

Article language: Spanish

Published online: 24 July 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.15028.mav
Resumen
El objetivo del presente estudio fue analizar el controvertido estatus de tres medidas lingüísticas ampliamente utilizadas en la investigación empírica de Adquisición de Segundas Lenguas, como son la longitud promedio de la unidad terminal, la longitud promedio de la cláusula y la longitud promedio de la oración. Sesenta y cinco aprendientes griegos de español como lengua extranjera realizaron dos tareas escritas y su actuación se evaluó con base en un total de 24 medidas de precisión, fluidez y complejidad sintáctica y léxica. Mediante la aplicación del Análisis Factorial Común se pudo constatar que las medidas de longitud (longitud promedio de la unidad terminal y de la cláusula) y de subordinación cargan en factores diferentes y, más que fluidez, dichas medidas evalúan diferentes facetas del constructo de complejidad sintáctica. En cuanto a la longitud promedio de la oración, los resultados sugieren que esta medida se ve influenciada por factores relacionados con su cómputo, con la extensión de los textos analizados, así como por las convenciones lingüísticas que rigen la lengua materna o extranjera.
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine the controversy surrounding three linguistic measures widely used in the empirical research of Second Language Acquisition, e.g., mean length of T-Unit, mean length of clause, and mean length of utterance. The corpus consisted of two compositions written by a group of 65 Greek learners of Spanish as a foreign language, which were analysed on the basis of 24 linguistic measures of accuracy, fluency, and syntactic and lexical complexity. The results obtained using Common Factor Analysis revealed that measures of mean length (mean length of T-Unit and mean length of clause) and subordination measures load on different factors, and these measures, more than fluency, gauge different aspects of syntactic complexity. On the other hand, mean length of utterance is likely to be influenced by factors related to the method of measurement, the length of the texts being analysed, as well as the linguistic conventions of both one’s native and foreign language.
Article outline
  • 1.Introducción
  • 2.Conceptualización y medición de los constructos de CAF
  • 3.Conceptualización, medición y problemas metodológicos relacionados con las unidades de análisis del discurso
  • 4.Análisis Factorial Exploratorio: Una herramienta útil al servicio del investigador de ASL
  • 5.Metodología
    • 5.1Participantes
    • 5.2Tareas escritas
    • 5.3Procedimiento de recogida y tratamiento de los datos
  • 6.Resultados
  • 7.Discusión
  • 8.Conclusiones
  • Notas
  • Referencias
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