ABSTRACT
This chapter explores reports on a study investigating task and style effects on second language narrative retellings, with comparisons also between native and non-native performances. Two groups, of native and non-native speakers, completed four video-based narrative retelling tasks which varied in degree of structural organization. Performances were measured in terms of structural and lexical complexity and of fluency. Lexical diversity, often called the type-token ratio, reflects the number of different words in relation to the total number of words used, and is taken to be an index of the speaker's capacity to integrate different words into their performance as opposed to recycling a smaller subset of words. Lexical sophistication, a text-external measure, reflects the speaker's ability to use less frequent words, and is taken to reflect the mobilization of a wider and perhaps less habitual mental lexicon. The main presentation of results has not included data for accuracy, principally because accuracy was not an issue for the native speaker group.
