Bozdağ Fatih Ünal, Mo Junhua, Morris Gareth
Faculty of Science and Humanities, Osmaniye Korkut Ata University, Fakiusagi Mah, Merkez Osmaniye, Turkey.
School of Foreign Languages, Soochow University, Suzhou, China.
PLoS One. 2025 Mar 18;20(3):e0320092. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0320092. eCollection 2025.
Complex noun phrases, as a distinctive feature of academic writing, pose an important learning task for L2 learners. Noun modifiers are the primary means of constructing complex noun phrases. Due to the development of natural language processing (NLP) technologies in recent years, noun phrase complexity, which is a micro-syntactic complexity indicator reflecting the complexity and diversity of clausal and phrasal structures, has emerged as an important research topic. This study applies Bayesian regression with informative priors to analyze the use of English noun modifiers by L2 learners of different proficiency levels and L1 backgrounds through the exploration of the EF Cambridge Open Language Database (EFCAMDAT) corpus. It finds that L2 proficiency has a significant impact on the development of noun phrase complexity in non-academic writing, while the influence of L1 background is observable but limited. It thus concludes that as second language proficiency increases, learners tend to converge towards a common grammatical competence that transcends their native linguistic frameworks.
复杂名词短语作为学术写作的一个显著特征，对第二语言学习者来说是一项重要的学习任务。名词修饰语是构建复杂名词短语的主要手段。近年来，由于自然语言处理（NLP）技术的发展，名词短语复杂性作为一种反映从句和短语结构复杂性和多样性的微观句法复杂性指标，已成为一个重要的研究课题。本研究通过探索EF剑桥开放语言数据库（EFCAMDAT）语料库，应用带有信息先验的贝叶斯回归来分析不同熟练程度和第一语言背景的第二语言学习者对英语名词修饰语的使用情况。研究发现，第二语言熟练程度对非学术写作中名词短语复杂性的发展有显著影响，而第一语言背景的影响虽然可以观察到，但较为有限。因此得出结论，随着第二语言熟练程度的提高，学习者倾向于趋向一种超越其母语语言框架的共同语法能力。
