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Crosslinguistically, inflectional morphology exhibits a spectacular range of complexity in both the structure of individual words and the organization of systems that words participate in. We distinguish two dimensions in the analysis of morphological complexity. Enumerative complexity (E-complexity) reflects the number of morphosyntactic distinctions that languages make and the strategies employed to encode them, concerning either the internal composition of words or the arrangement of classes of words into inflection classes. This, we argue, is constrained by INTEGRATIVE COMPLEXITY (I-complexity). The I-complexity of an inflectional system reflects the difficulty that a paradigmatic system poses for language users (rather than lexicographers) in information-theoretic terms. This becomes clear by distinguishing AVERAGE PARADIGM ENTROPY from AVERAGE CONDITIONAL ENTROPY. The average entropy of a paradigm is the uncertainty in guessing the realization for a particular cell of the paradigm of a particular lexeme (given knowledge of the possible exponents). This gives one a measure of the complexity of a morphological system—systems with more exponents and more inflection classes will in general have higher average paradigm entropy—but it presupposes a problem that adult native speakers will never encounter. In order to know that a lexeme exists, the speaker must have heard at least one word form, so in the worst case a speaker will be faced with predicting a word form based on knowledge of one other word form of that lexeme. Thus, a better measure of morphological complexity is the average conditional entropy, the average uncertainty in guessing the realization of one randomly selected cell in the paradigm of a lexeme given the realization of one other randomly selected cell. This is the I-complexity of paradigm organization. Viewed from this information-theoretic perspective, languages that appear to differ greatly in their E-complexity—the number of exponents, inflectional classes, and principal parts—can actually be quite similar in terms of the challenge they pose for a language user who already knows how the system works. We adduce evidence for this hypothesis from three sources: a comparison between languages of varying degrees of E-complexity, a case study from the particularly challenging conjugational system of Chiquihuitlán Mazatec, and a Monte Carlo simulation modeling the encoding of morphosyntactic properties into formal expressions. The results of these analyses provide evidence for the crucial status of words and paradigms for understanding morphological organization.

This study intends to describe the diachronic changes of linguistic complexity (i.e., overall, morphological, and syntactic complexity) in scientific writing based on Kolmogorov complexity, an information-theoretic approach. We have chosen the entire data (i.e., all the 24 text types including articles, letters, news, etc.) and two individual registers (i.e., the full texts and abstracts of articles) of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London , the world’s oldest scientific writing journal. The Mann–Kendall trend tests were used to capture diachronic changes in linguistic complexity at three complexity levels, and the Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated to investigate the relationships between the three complexity metrics. Results showed that the overall and morphological complexity of both the entire data and full texts increased from 1821 to 1920, indicating a massive lexical expansion during this 100-year period, as evidenced by more and more word form variants in scientific writing. In contrast, the syntactic complexity of the entire data and full texts declined, suggesting a gradual shift towards grammatical simplification in the evolution of scientific writing, particularly in word order rules and syntactic patterns. A trade-off effect has also been found between syntactic and morphological complexity in the entire data. In addition, concerning abstracts, the overall and morphological complexity decreased while the syntactic complexity increased. Drawing from these results, researchers can better understand the changing linguistic complexity styles in scientific writing, thus making adjustments in their writing accordingly to garner greater attention in academia.

We know a great deal about children’s first steps into reading. Here, we explore how they become more sophisticated readers, learning to read complex words. Theoretical accounts predict that one key factor is morphological awareness, or awareness of the minimal units of meaning in language. And yet empirical studies have yet to clarify whether morphological awareness has a stronger relation to the development of reading skill for words with multiple morphemes in particular (i.e., morphological decoding) or to the reading of a whole range of words. We examined this question in this study by contrasting the role of morphological awareness in the development of morphological decoding and of broader word reading skill. Participants were 197 English-speaking children who were followed from Grade 3 to 4. We conducted longitudinal analyses that included stringent autoregressive controls to capture the determinants of gains over time, as well as controls for vocabulary and phonological awareness. Structural equation modeling (SEM) path analysis with this set of controls revealed that morphological awareness predicted significant unique gains in morphological decoding from Grade 3 to 4 with no such unique contributions to broader word reading skill. These findings clarify the role of morphological awareness in supporting children in developing the ability to read morphologically complex words, supporting a more targeted role for morphology in theories of word reading development.

Current research on eye movements in reading has reached a commonly accepted consensus that eye guidance-specifically, the locations of fixations within words-is determined exclusively by low-level visual features. However, this view has been challenged recently by studies in some agglutinative languages, Uighur and Finnish, where saccades have been shown to be influenced also by high-level linguistic features such as morphological complexity. The present study aimed at establishing the generalizability of the effect by extending it to an understudied written language, traditional Mongolian, with a vertical direction of text. Moreover, the current study adopted a corpus-analytic approach, which offers better ecological validity and captures wider ranges of independent variables using much larger datasets than controlled experiments. Consistent with earlier reports, our results demonstrated an influence of morphological complexity on saccades, with first fixations landing closer to the word beginning for morphologically more complex words. The morphological effect was more robust for shorter words and for less frequent words. The results suggest that Mongolian readers can decompose a saccade-target word parafoveally and modulate their saccade execution accordingly.

Genre-based research holds significant theoretical and practical importance in second language acquisition (SLA). While many L2 English writing studies have suggested argumentative writing was generally more challenging than narrative, whether this generalization applies to typologically different languages, such as German with its complex morphological and structural properties, requires further investigation. Specifically, genre effects on L2 writing development remain insufficiently understood for non-English languages, particularly regarding complexities beyond syntactic and lexical. This study examines how genre influences the development of morphological, lexical, syntactic, and cohesive complexity in elementary-intermediate Chinese learners of German over time. A longitudinal corpus of narrative and argumentative essays from 21 learners, who wrote both genres, was analyzed. The results show that genre effects were evident but not straightforward, with no genre consistently exhibiting greater complexity. Over time, learners predominantly exhibited nonlinear development patterns, suggesting the dynamic nature of SLA. Additionally, they exhibited decreasing lexical sophistication in both genres despite improvements in other complexity measures, indicating a “complexity trade-off” between linguistic subsystems. These findings contribute empirical evidence to the cross-linguistic comparisons in SLA research and suggest that curricula should incorporate diverse genres to develop multifaceted linguistic competence, with pedagogical approaches tailored to genre-specific complexity patterns and developmental trajectories.

In the past decades, there has been a surge in interest in the study of language complexity in second language (L2) research. In this article we provide an overview of current theoretical and methodological practices in L2 complexity research, while simultaneously framing these within the broader scientific interest into the notion of complexity. In addition to focusing on the role of complexity in L2 research, we trace how language complexity has figured in formal theoretical and typological linguistics. It is argued that L2 complexity research has often adopted a reductionist approach to the construct, both in terms of its definition and its operationalization. As such, previous L2 research has often confused related but conceptually distinct and operationally separable notions, such as relative and absolute complexity, and it has overemphasized syntactic and lexical forms of complexity at the expense of complexity related to morphology or linguistic interface phenomena. We then discuss a collection of five empirical studies which react to several of these issues by highlighting hitherto underexplored forms of complexity, adopting an explicitly cross-linguistic perspective or by proposing novel forms of L2 complexity measurement.

Skilled reading comprehension is an important goal of educational instruction and models of reading development. In this study, the authors investigated how core skills surrounding morphemes, that is, the minimal units of meaning in language, support the development of reading comprehension. The authors specifically contrast the roles of morphological awareness and morphological analysis; the first refers to the awareness of and ability to manipulate morphemes in language, and the second refers to the use of morphemes in inferring the meaning of unfamiliar morphologically complex (multimorphemic) words. The authors evaluated these morphological skills in 197 English-speaking students who were followed from grade 3 to grade 4; the analyses used stringent autoregressor controls to home in on predictors of gains over time. In addition to morphological awareness and morphological analysis, the authors assessed students’reading comprehension and controls for word reading, vocabulary, phonological awareness, nonverbal ability, and age. Multivariate autoregressive path analysis revealed that morphological analysis, but not morphological awareness, predicted gains in reading comprehension. Morphological awareness, for its part, predicted gains in morphological analysis. Taken together, the findings allude to a developmental trajectory whereby students’use of morphemes to infer the meanings of unfamiliar complex words supports the development of reading comprehension over time. The development of this skill, in turn, appears to be supported by a more general awareness of morphemes in language. These findings contribute to theory and reading instruction by clarifying the ways in which morphological skills support the development of students’ reading comprehension.

This paper assesses the role of socio-demographic triggers on Kolmogorov-based complexity in spoken English varieties. It thus contributes to the ongoing debate on contact and complexity in the sociolinguistic typological research community. Currently, evidence on whether socio-demographic triggers influence the morphosyntactic complexity of languages is controversial and inconclusive. Particularly controversial is the influence of the proportion of non-native speakers and the number of native speakers, which are both common proxies for language contact. In order to illuminate the issue from an English-varieties perspective, I use regression analysis to test several socio-demographic triggers in a corpus database of spoken English varieties. Language complexity here is operationalised in terms of Kolmogorov-based morphological and syntactic complexity. The results only partially support the idea that socio-demographic triggers influence morphosyntactic complexity in English varieties, i.e., speaker-related triggers turn out to be negative but non-significant. Yet, net migration rate shows a positive significant effect on morphological complexity which needs to be seen in the global context of English as a commodity and unequal access to English. I thus argue that socioeconomic triggers are better predictors for complexity than demographic speaker numbers. In sum, the paper opens up new horizons for research on language complexity.

We argue that head movement, as an operation that builds head-adjunction structures in the syntax, has been used to model two empirically distinct classes of phenomena. One class has to do with displacement of heads (fully formed morphological words) to higher syntactic positions, and includes phenomena like verb second and verb initiality. The other class has to do with the construction of complex morphological words and is involved in various types of word formation. Based on the very different clusters of properties associated with these two classes of phenomena, we argue that they each should be accounted for by distinct grammatical operations, applying in distinct modules of the grammar, rather than by the one traditional syntactic head movement operation. We propose that the operation responsible for upward displacement of heads is genuine syntactic movement (Internal Merge) and has the properties of syntactic phrasal movement, including the ability to affect word order, the potential to give rise to interpretive effects, and the locality associated with Internal Merge. On the other hand, word formation is the result of postsyntactic amalgamation, realized as either Lowering (Embick and Noyer 2001) or its upward counterpart, Raising. This operation, we argue, has properties that are not associated with narrow syntax: it is morphologically driven, it results in word formation, it does not exhibit interpretive effects, and it has stricter locality conditions (the Head Movement Constraint). The result is a view of head movement that not only accounts for the empirical differences between the two classes of head movement phenomena, but also lays to rest numerous perennial theoretical problems that have heretofore been associated with the syntactic head adjunction view of head movement. In addition, the framework developed here yields interesting new predictions with respect to the expected typology of head movement patterns.

This narrative review discusses quantitative indices measuring differences between alphabetic languages that are related to the process of word recognition. The specific orthography that a child is acquiring has been identified as a central element influencing reading acquisition and dyslexia. However, the development of reliable metrics to measure differences between language scripts hasn’t received much attention so far. This paper therefore reviews metrics proposed in the literature for quantifying orthographic transparency, syllabic complexity, and morphological complexity of alphabetic languages. The review included searches of Web of Science, PubMed, PsychInfo, Google Scholar, and various online sources. Search terms pertained to orthographic transparency, morphological complexity, and syllabic complexity in relation to reading acquisition, and dyslexia. Although the predictive value of these metrics is promising, more research is needed to validate the value of the metrics discussed and to understand the ‘developmental footprint’ of orthographic transparency, morphological complexity, and syllabic complexity in the lexical organization and processing strategies.