产出方式对中级水平汉语二语者句法复杂度的影响

Effects of production modalities on syntactic complexity in intermediate level CSL learners

本文首次搭建了汉语二语句法复杂度测量体系,以100名中级汉语水平二语者的口语和写作产出为研究对象,考察句子、搭配、短语和语法点层面的59项句法复杂度指标哪些可以有效区分口语和写作产出,哪些可以有效预测口语和写作成绩,这些指标对口语和写作成绩的贡献度有何差异。研究发现,在45项指标上口语和写作的句法复杂度存在显著差异,其中写作句法复杂度显著高于口语的有38项,包括2项句子层面指标、3项短语指标、8项语法点指标和25项搭配指标;口语句法复杂度显著高于写作的有7项,包括2项句子层面指标、2项搭配指标和3项语法点指标。复杂名词短语总长度、低频三元组比例Ⅱ和高级语法点密度可以解释写作成绩总变异的48.2%,二元组多样度和平均小句长可以解释口语成绩总变异的55.5%。以上结果表明,汉语二语口语和写作在各维度句法复杂度上存在本质差异,各自具有独特的句法特点;研究还表明,不同维度的句法复杂度指标对汉语二语口语和写作评分的预测作用也存在差异,写作评分中复杂名词短语的贡献最大,口语评分中二元组多样度贡献最大。另外,我们从口语和写作的句法特征差异、两种产出方式的认知加工过程以及语篇长度等方面解释了造成差异的原因。

This study proposes 59 novel indices of syntactic complexity for Chinese as a second language(CSL)that tap into four structural types:sentential,collocational,phrasal,and grammatical,and investigates the extent to which they can discriminate written and spoken production modalities and predict speaking and writing scores.Our data consist of a corpus of speaking and writing samples produced by 100 intermediate CSL learners.Results reveal that 45 measures discriminate spoken and written production.The syntactic complexity of writing is higher than that of speaking on 38 measures,including two sentence-level indices,three phrasal indices,eight grammatical indices and 25 collocational indices.The syntactic complexity of speaking is higher than that of writing on seven measures,including two sentence-level indices,two collocational indices and three grammatical indices.The length of complex noun phrases,the ratio of low frequency trigramⅡand the density of advanced grammar points explain 48.2%of the variance in writing scores.Bigram diversity and the mean length of clause explain 55.5%of the variance in speaking scores.These results confirm a significant modality effect on syntactic complexity in CSL spoken and written production,with speaking and writing displaying distinct syntactic features.They further reveal differential predictive power of different types of syntactic complexity indices for speaking and writing scores,with complex noun phrases and bigram diversity contributing the most to writing and speaking scores,respectively.We explain these results in terms of the differences between speaking and writing in syntactic features,cognitive processes and length of production.