Towards Greater Conceptual Clarity in Complexity and Difficulty: A Commentary on “Complexity and Difficulty in Second Language Acquisition: A Theoretical and Methodological Overview”.

The article discusses the conceptual and methodological challenges surrounding complexity and difficulty in second language acquisition research. It highlights the distinction between complexity as structural properties of linguistic items and difficulty as cognitive costs associated with acquiring and using these items. The authors propose core measures for researchers to promote replicability and knowledge accumulation. The commentary also touches upon debates on complexity measurement, syntactic units of analysis, and the consideration of word meanings in analyzing complexity and difficulty. The article emphasizes the need for complementary measures at different levels of granularity and sensitivity to language-specific features. [Extracted from the article]