Ortega is noted in the field of second language acquisition for her paper entitled "Towards an Organic Approach to Investigating CAF in Instructed SLA: The Case of Complexity", published in Applied Linguistics in which she claimed along with John Norris that syntactic complexity need to be measured multidimensionally.[5]
↑Norris, J. M.; Ortega, L. (2009). "Towards an Organic Approach to Investigating CAF in Instructed SLA: The Case of Complexity". Applied Linguistics. 30 (4): 555–578. doi:10.1093/applin/amp044.