The relative complexity of alternation phenomena in spoken English as a Foreign Language

Abstract While the assumption within theoretical linguistics is that alternation phenomena (e.g., “everyone” vs. “everybody”) lead to redundant complexity because they introduce multiple ways of saying the same thing, this assumption has not yet been tested empirically for EFL learners. To fill this gap, we collected thousands of spoken utterances from low-intermediate to advanced learners of English with either Spanish, Chinese or Italian as their L1 background from the Trinity Lancaster Corpus . Using mixed-effects Poisson regression, we analyzed whether the number of alternation phenomena correlates with the relative complexity of utterances, operationalized as being proportional to the number of disfluencies produced. Results indicate that, even for low-intermediate learners of English, alternation contexts do not induce more disfluencies, contrary to commonly held assumptions in theoretical linguistics and in line with similar research on L1 English speakers.