Assessing Writing Oct 2026 Open Access

How the complex verb phrase complexity measures predict Chinese L2 writing quality

Yuxin Hao Shanghai International Studies University ; Jinshu Li Hefei University ; Xuelin Wang Guangdong University of Foreign Studies ; Haitao Liu Fudan University

Abstract

Previous studies on L2 phrase complexity predominantly focused on noun phrases, while the verb phrase complexity are few and mostly simple verb phrase structures, they have limited expressive capacity. Complex verb phrase structures (e.g., n-grams, VACs) also have limitations. The present study proposes a set of 41 Chinese complex verb phrase structures and are meaningful. A total of 246 verb phrase complexity measures are calculated from the dimensions of account, frequency, diversity, and density. The ability of these measures to predict writing quality is compared with that of 10 large-grained syntactic complexity measures. The results show that large-grained measures (Average sentence length) and verb phrase complexity measures (two verb-object structures and three adverbial-head structures) can respectively explain 14.4% and 41.9% of variance in writing scores. Our results illustrate the importance of Chinese complex verb phrase structures in assessing L2 writing quality.

Journal
Assessing Writing
Published
2026-10-01
DOI
10.1016/j.asw.2026.101109
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Open Access
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