Foreigner-directed speech is simpler than native-directed: Evidence from social media (2020)

Abstract: I test two hypotheses that play an important role in modern sociolinguistics and language evolution studies: first, that non-native production is simpler than native; second, that production addressed to non-native speakers is simpler than that addressed to natives. The second hypothesis is particularly important for theories about contact-induced simplification, since the accommodation to non-natives may explain how the simplification can spread from adult learners to the whole community. To test the hypotheses, I create a very large corpus of native and non-native written speech in four languages (English, French, Italian, Spanish), extracting data from an internet forum where native languages of the participants are known and the structure of the interactions can be inferred. The corpus data yield inconsistent evidence with respect to the first hypothesis, but largely support the second one, suggesting that foreigner-directed speech is indeed simpler than native-directed. Importantly, when testing the first hypothesis, I contrast production of different speakers, which can introduce confounds and is a likely reason for the inconsistencies. When testing the second hypothesis, the comparison is always within the production of the same speaker (but with different addressees), which makes it more reliable.

## introduction an important and relatively recent development in sociolinguistics, language evolution and typology is increased interest in sociocognitive determinants of linguistic complexity. several influential theories @xcite @xcite @xcite link the likelihood of a language to maintain or to lose complexity to several social factors, most prominently, the proportion of non-native (l2) speakers in the population and population size. their main claim can be formulated as follows: large proportion of l2 speakers and large population size are likely to favour simplification (first of all, morphological simplification), presumably because they inhibit perfect language transmission. while interesting per se, this hypothesis can also be viewed as part of a larger question: to what extent do languages adapt to extralinguistic factors @xcite . there has been accumulated a solid body of evidence that at least partially supports this causal link. the evidence comes from typological studies @xcite @xcite @xcite , diachronic analyses @xcite , computational modeling @xcite and laboratory experiments @xcite @xcite . nonetheless, the evidence is not entirely consistent. studies, for instance, yield different results with respect to whether both factors (population size and proportion of l2 speakers) are at play @xcite or only one of them @xcite , or whether population size does play a role, but solely because it is strongly correlated with the proportion of l2 speakers. moreover, the alleged mechanism of simplification is not fully clear. if we focus on the proportion of l2 speakers as the causal factor, then the hypothetical mechanism of its influence can be in very broad strokes represented as follows: it has been suggested @xcite ) that one of the processes that can account for this "missing link" is foreigner-directed speech, which occurs when more proficient (l1) speakers accommodate their production to less proficient (l2) speakers. @xcite observe an equivalent of foreigner-directed speech in their artificial language-learning experiment which does lead to community-level language simplification. they argue convincingly that a similar process may occur in real languages, too, but it is an open question whether it actually does. moreover, while foreigner-directed speech is being actively studied @xcite @xcite @xcite , i am not aware of any study that would convincingly show, using a corpus of natural production, that foreigner-directed speech is indeed simpler than native-directed. coming back to link 2, it has neither been reliably established that production of l2 speakers is on average simpler than that of l1 speakers. in this paper, i attempt to fill in both these gaps using english, french, italian and spanish data extracted from a very large internet forum. the resulting corpus has several advantages over most of the existing learner corpora foot_0 . it represents naturally occurring written production; it is very large both in terms of number of tokens and number of speakers; the native language of every speaker is known; for many messages, it is possible to identify to whom they are addressed. to sum up, i test two hypotheses: 1. non-native written speech is on average simpler than native; 2. written speech addressed to non-native speakers is on average simpler than that addressed to natives. hypothesis 2 can be further nuanced by asking whether the presence and degree of simplification depends on the addresser being an l1 speaker or an l2 speaker. for the theories about sociallyfacilitated language simplification, the most important sub-hypothesis is whether l1 speakers accom-ita fra spa eng l1 words (m) 3.6 6.8 23.1 71.1 l2 words (m) 1.0 3.8 5.7 54.7 l1 speakers (k) 3.1 5.0 17.4 17.4 l2 speakers (k) 1.9 5.9 7.6 39.2 ## discussion i used the wordreference corpus data to test two hypotheses: the answer to both questions is "probably yes". the reason why the method described in the paper might work well for the comparison of l1directed and l2-directed production, but not for the comparison of l1 and l2 production is that in the latter case what is being compared is always the production of the same speaker (addressed to different persons). in the former case, the production of different speakers is compared, and that might introduce different confounds. it may, for instance, be that some l2 speakers use fewer different forms (ttr decreases), but some make many misspellings (ttr increases) 3 . other systematic confounds may be present, e.g. that l2 speakers to a larger extent use quotes from textbooks (or some other sources they want to ask a question about) or rely on translation software etc. on the contrary, when the compared texts belong to the same speaker, we can assume that all parameters apart from that of interest (addressee's proficiency) are equivalent, which makes the comparison more reliable. the same reasons make the comparisons across languages difficult. cross-linguistic complexity comparisons were not relevant to the theoretical questions of this paper, but are of course still interesting and important. one obvious observation, however, can be made in this respect: english has noticeably lower ttr than the three romance languages (as expected). in section 2.2, i raised the question whether the observed effects are due to the differences in lexical or grammatical complexity. for the cross-linguistic differences, the reason is likely to be in the domain of the grammar (english inflection is much poorer than romance; while there is no reason to claim that about english lexicon), which suggests that the other differences are also at least partly due to grammatical complexity. the answer to the first skeptical question is more hypothetical. if hypothesis 1 is wrong, hypothesis 2 may still be correct. it may be that while l2 speakers are less proficient, their production is not simpler (at least not as measured by ttr): for instance, it can be more variable, thus inflating complexity values. nonetheless, l1 speakers are sensitive to the differences in proficiency and, being more capable of controlling their production, simplify it in order to accommodate to their interlocutors. that, however, is just a speculation. the openly-available wordreference corpus can be used for further studies of foreigner-directed speech (and, of course, other phenomena related to non-native acquisition and usage). the understanding of the properties of l2 production can, for instance, be nuanced by taking into account other relevant factors, such as speakers' mother tongues @xcite or social-network structure @xcite . ## conclusions data from the wordreference corpus (a very large and diverse corpus of naturally occurring written speech in four languages) support the hypothesis that written speech addressed to non-native speakers is on average simpler than that addressed to natives (regardless of who is the addresser: a native or a non-native speaker). there is, however, some variation across languages and measurement thresholds. the same data, however, do not provide conclusive evidence with respect to hypothesis that non-native written speech is on average simpler than native. a probable reason is that the comparison of the production of different speakers is affected by various confounds and not as robust and reliable as comparison within one speaker's production. the finding that foreigner-directed speech is simpler than native-directed is important for theories of contact-induced language simplification, since it may potentially explain how simplification spreads from non-native speakers to the whole population (including the coming generations). the scripts that were used to create the corpus, extract the data and perform the statistical analysis, as well as the current version of the corpus are openly available foot_3 .