Monolingual Vs. Bilingual: A Corpus-based Analysis of Written L2 Syntactic Complexity between Finnish-speaking, and Finnish and Swedish-speaking Upper Secondary Students

Abstract

The present study considered the L2 syntactic complexity measured in written essays of two subject groups: monolingual Finnish-speaking and bilingual Finnish and Swedish-speaking EFL upper secondary students. The L1 effect on syntactic complexity has been found to be significant (e.g. Khushik and Huhta 2019; Lu and Ai 2015; Crossley and McNamara 2012) but only few studies exist on bilingualism and L2 syntactic complexity. The data of the present study, 22 monolinguals and 22 bilinguals, were drawn from a corpus that has been collected in Finland Proper. The aim of the present study was to study the nature of L2 syntactic complexity in the monolingual and bilingual subject groups, and to broaden the research field of L2 syntactic complexity for bilingualism. An automated computation tool, L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer was utilised to run a syntactic complexity analysis with the essays written by the subjects. Tests were run on the output values from the tool. As a result, the bilingual group scored higher in all the 14 measures utilised. Through the three length-based measures measuring overall syntactic complexity and phrasal complexity (mean length of sentence, mean length of T-unit and mean length of clause) were found statistically significant differences between the two subject groups. The other indices showed small differences only. More studies with bilinguals and L2 syntactic complexity are recommended to better understand the effect that bilingualism has on language learning and development.