La relación entre complejidad léxica y sintáctica en una tarea narrativa. ¿Dos caras de la misma moneda?

Marco Berton

doi:10.7557/1.11.3.6577

Authors

Marco Berton University of Oslo

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/1.11.3.6577

Keywords:

complejidad lingüística, complejidad léxica, complejidad sintáctica, producción escrita, dificultad de la tarea, ELE

Abstract

The main hypotheses (trade-off hypothesis and cognition hypothesis) regarding the effects of task difficulty on linguistic production do not seem to make specific predictions as regards the different features commonly covered by the umbrella-term ‘linguistic complexity’. The present study investigates the effects of task difficulty on lexical and syntactic complexity in a narrative task written by Swedish university students of Spanish as a foreign language. Moreover, the relationship between these two features of linguistic complexity is analysed with the aim of finding possible changes in such relationship due to the different degree of task difficulty. The results point towards a positive relationship between lexis and syntax, when these are operationalised as lexical diversity and subordination indexes. Conversely, the correlation between lexical diversity and a coordination index showed a negative relationship.

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