Untutored second language acquisition. A student from Turkey named Alex is attending a university in the United States. While in this country, he has never been tutored in English. After his second year at university, Alex was interviewed numerous times over a 1-year period. His language was analyzed for syntactic complexity (measured as number of clauses per analysis-

of-speech unit) and lexical diversity (a complex measure, called D, on a 100-point scale). Applied Linguistics

(May 2014) reported Alex’s syntactic complexity and lexical diversity values from his first interview as 1.73 and 55.88, respectively. For comparison purposes, the researchers recorded similar language scores for 3 native English speakers, all who attended the same university and had the same major as Alex. The syntactic complexity scores of the 3 English speakers were 1.88, 1.82, and 2.22. The lexical diversity scores of the 3 English speakers were 64.62, 58.03, and 56.97. According to the researchers,

“Alex is within native speaker range, even allowing for the variation that naturally takes place within conversation.”

Do you agree? Explain.