Majid Zare Dastgerdi

The Relationship between Length of T-unit and Lexical Complexity in Interdisciplinary ISI Articles Written by American and Iranian Researchers

Writing is a skill that is mastered in the later stages of learning a language because of its intricacy and complexity. The subject of writing complexity and its measurement has been receiving more attention since the 1990s. Researchers have taken different approaches towards complexity, ranging from fine-grained to holistic ways. This study attempted to measure the syntactic complexity (SC) and lexical complexity (LC) of two corpora consisting of the interdisciplinary ISI academic articles written by Iranian and American researchers. The measurement of SC was based on the length of the T-unit, while that of LC was according to the occurrences of academic words listed in the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000). Following a scarcity of research on the relationship between SC and LC, this study analyzed the relationship between the two measurement criteria. It then looked into the difference between the native and nonnative corpora regarding SC and LC. Spearman correlation indicated no meaningful relationship between SC and LC; however, the results of Mann Whiney U-test analysis showed a statistically significant difference between the writings of native and nonnative scholars regarding SC and LC.