MDD, dependency syntax, Czech, second language acquisition

Syntactic analysis is a crucial part of second language acquisition studies. Over the past 30 years, researchers have developed numerous measures to evaluate the syntactic development of second language writers, concentrating on clause, t-unit, or sentence length. Recent attention has shifted towards measures that reflect sentence dependency structures, as demonstrated by mean dependency distance (MDD). Employing MDD, we actively analyse the syntactic development of Czech L2 texts using 5,721 samples that cover A1–C1 proficiency levels. We compare results with a reference corpus of texts authored by Czech native speakers (SKRIPT2012; Šebesta et al. 2013). We explore cross-linguistic influence by comparing Slavic language speakers and other language speakers at the same proficiency levels. Findings indicate a positive correlation between language proficiency and MDD, with significant differences between adjacent levels. Slavic L1 groups consistently demonstrate higher MDD than their other language speaker counterparts.

Syntactic analysis is a crucial part of second language acquisition studies. Over the past 30 years, researchers have developed numerous measures to evaluate the syntactic development of second language writers, concentrating on clause, t-unit, or sentence length. Recent attention has shifted towards measures that reflect sentence dependency structures, as demonstrated by mean dependency distance (MDD). Employing MDD, we actively analyse the syntactic development of Czech L2 texts using 5,721 samples that cover A1–C1 proficiency levels. We compare results with a reference corpus of texts authored by Czech native speakers (SKRIPT2012; Šebesta et al. 2013). We explore cross-linguistic influence by comparing Slavic language speakers and other language speakers at the same proficiency levels. Findings indicate a positive correlation between language proficiency and MDD, with significant differences between adjacent levels. Slavic L1 groups consistently demonstrate higher MDD than their other language speaker counterparts.