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What can corpus software reveal about language development?

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What can corpus software reveal about language development?

Xiaofei Lu

The Pennsylvania State University

1. What is language development?

Language development refers to the process in which the language faculty develops in a

human being. First language (L1) development is concerned with how children acquire the

capability of their native language, while second language (L2) development is concerned

with how children and adults acquire the capability of an L2.

Theories of L1 development generally need to address at least the following three questions:

what children bring to the language learning task, what mechanisms drive language

acquisition, and what types of input support the language-learning system (Pence and

Justice 2017). Psychologists have taken drastically different approaches to answering these

questions, among which the rationalist, empiricist, and pragmatist paradigms have been the

most influential (Russell 2004). The rationalist approach, inspired by Chomskyan

linguistics, takes the view that the language faculty does not depend on external sources for

its content but is internal to each individual. For rationalists, children are born with innate

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formal knowledge of a universal grammar, and they bring this domain-specific knowledge

to the task of acquiring the I-language (i.e. the internal and individual language) of their

native tongue. Language input is used to discover the parameters that their native language

uses to satisfy the universal grammar. The empiricist approach, upheld by connectionists,

believes that the content of the language faculty is not innate, but is derived from perceptual

experience. For empiricists, children employ domain-general mechanisms of associative

learning to acquire the rules and representations of their native language through experience

with sufficient speech input. The pragmatist or socio-cognitivist approach advocates that

children recruit their socio-cognitive capacity to actively construct their language faculty.

Within this paradigm, language is viewed as a socio-cultural action, and the language

development process is viewed as involving children constructing a series of models or

working theories of their mother tongue from the evidence that is available to them.

Theories of L2 development generally seek to explain a different set of questions, including

the nature of L2 knowledge, the nature of interlanguage, the contributions of knowledge of

the L1, the contributions of the linguistic environment, and the role of instruction (Ortega

2014). A total of 14 contemporary theories of or approaches to L2 development or

acquisition are presented in VanPatten and Williams (2014) and Atkinson (2011). These

theories take different stances with respect to the various aspects of L2 development. For

example, concerning the nature of L2 knowledge, the Chomskyan universal grammar

theory, which is committed to nativism (a theoretical perspective positing that children

have the innate ability to acquire language), argues that L2 learners cannot obtain

knowledge of ungrammaticality and ambiguity from linguistic input, but possess pre-

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existing knowledge of the grammar that constrains their learning task (White 2014).

Contrastively, the skill acquisition theory, which is committed to conscious processing,

claims that development happens from initial representation of knowledge through

proceduralization of knowledge to eventual automatization of knowledge (DeKeyser 2014).

Still different is the Vygotskian sociocultural theory, which views L2 knowledge as socially

distributed, ‘places mediation, either by other or self, at the core of development and use’

and understands development ‘not only in terms of target-like performance but also in

terms of the quality and quantity of external mediation required’ (Lantolf and Thorne 2011:

24).

2. How do we measure language development?

In addition to the theoretical question of how language development takes place, another

important and more practical question that is of interest to teachers, researchers, parents,

and/or clinicians is what stage of language development a particular child or L2 learner is

in, or in other words, how much a child or L2 learner knows about the language system and

its use at a particular point. Measurement of language development is especially important

for children suffering any delay or disorder in their language development. There are

multiple ways to answer this question, including naturalistic observation; production,

comprehension, and judgment tasks; formal testing; and language sample analysis, among

others. In this section, we focus on how language development can be measured through

analyzing spoken or written language samples produced by a child or L2 learner.

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A number of measures of language development have been proposed and explored in the

child language development literature. Some measures are based on verbal output, e.g.

mean length of utterance (MLU) (Brown 1973) and number of different words (NDWs),

while others are based on structural analysis, e.g. Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS)

(Lee 1974), Index of Production Syntax (IPSyn) (Scarborough 1990), and Developmental

Level (D-Level) (Rosenberg and Abbeduto 1987; Covington et al. 2006). Both DSS and

IPSyn were developed to evaluate children’s grammatical development, although they work

in different ways. The DSS metric assigns a score to each sentence. It considers eight

different types of grammatical forms, including indefinite pronouns, personal pronouns,

main verbs, secondary or embedded verbs, conjunctions, negatives and two types of

questions. Variants of the same type of grammatical form are scored differently based on

the order in which children develop the ability to use them. The score of a sentence is the

sum of the points for each type plus one point if the sentence is fully grammatical. The

average DSS of a speaker can be computed using a representative language sample. The

IPSyn metric does not apply to individual sentences but examines the number of times 56

target grammatical structures are used in a sample produced by a speaker. These include

various types of noun phrases, verb phrases, questions, and some specific sentence

structures. Each occurrence of any of the target grammatical structures in the language

sample receives one point. However, a maximum of two occurrences of each structure are

counted, and the maximum score a language sample can receive is 112. The D-Level scale

classifies each sentence into one of eight increasingly more complex categories (Levels

zero through seven), depending on the syntactic structures it contains. For example, a

sentence containing a finite clause as the object of the main verb is classified as Level three,

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and a sentence containing an embedded clause serving as the subject of the main verb is

classified as Level six.

In the L2 development literature, a large number of developmental index studies have

attempted to identify objective measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) of

production that can be used to index the learner’s level of development or overall

proficiency in the target language. This is generally achieved by assessing the development

of L2 learners at known proficiency levels in the target language using various measures.

Developmental measures identified in such a way allow teachers and researchers to

evaluate and describe the learner’s developmental level in a more precise way. In addition,

they can also be used to examine the effect of a particular pedagogical treatment on

language use. Wolfe-Quintero et al. (1998) provided a comprehensive review of the

measures explored in 39 second and foreign language writing studies and recommended

several measures that were consistently linear and significantly related to program or school

levels as the best measures of development or error. These include three measures of

fluency, i.e. mean length of T-unit, where a T-unit is a main clause plus any subordinate

clauses (Hunt 1965), mean length of clause, and mean length of error-free T-unit; two

measures of accuracy, i.e. error-free T-units per T-unit, and errors per T-unit; two measures

of grammatical complexity, i.e. clauses per T-unit, and dependent clauses per clause; and

two measures of lexical complexity, i.e. total number of word types divided by the square

root of twice the total number of word tokens, and total number of sophisticated word types

divided by total number of word types. In terms of syntactic complexity, recent research

has argued for the need to focus on more fine-grained measures (Kyle 2016), measures of

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phrasal complexity, as well as co-occurrence patterns of lexico-grammatical features (e.g.

Biber et al. 2016). In a similar spirit, Hawkins and Buttery (2010) proposed and illustrated

the identification of a systematic set of criterial features for each proficiency level in the

Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). These features

captured the emergence, frequency, accuracy, and usage distribution of relevant linguistic

properties (e.g., verb co-occurrence frames and relative clauses) characterizing each

proficiency level. They further argued for the need to consider L1-specific features, a view

supported by later research demonstrating the influence of L1 on the acquisition order

and/or usage of different linguistic properties (e.g. Lu and Ai 2015; Murakami and

Alexopoulou 2016).

3. How can we use a corpus to find out more about first language development?

In this section, we discuss several ways in which a corpus of child language development

data may be used to find out more about L1 development. Some of these will be illustrated

using the following corpora and corpus analysis software: the Child Language Data

Exchange System (CHILDES) database, the Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN)

program (MacWhinney 2000), Computerized Profiling (Long 2019), and D-Level Analyzer

(Lu 2009). We briefly introduce each of these first.

The CHILDES database contains transcripts and media data collected from conversations

between young children of different ages and their parents, playmates, and caretakers.

These data are contributed by researchers from many different countries, following the

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same data collection and transcription standards. Each file in the database contains a

transcript of a conversation and includes a header that encodes information about the target

child or children (e.g. age, native language, whether the child is normal in terms of

language development, etc.), other participants, the location and situation of the

conversation, the activities that are going on during the conversation, and the researchers

and coders collecting and transcribing the data. The conversation is transcribed in a one-

utterance-per-line format, with the producer of each utterance clearly marked in a prefix.

Each utterance is followed by another line that consists of a morphological analysis of the

utterance. Any physical actions accompanying the utterance are also provided in a separate

line. The CLAN program is a collection of computational tools designed to automatically

analyze data transcribed in the CHILDES format. Some of the automatic analyses that the

program can run on one or more files in the CHILDES database include word frequency,

type/token ratio, a measure of vocabulary diversity called D (Durán et al. 2004), mean

length of turn, mean length of utterance, and DSS score, among others.

Computerized Profiling is a set of programs designed to analyze both written language

samples and phonetically transcribed spoken language samples. Linguistic analysis at a

range of different levels can be performed, including simple corpus statistics, semantics,

grammar, phonology, pragmatics, and narratives. For example, at the grammar level, the

following four procedures can be run: IPSyn, DSS, Black English Sentence Scoring (BESS)

(Nelson 1998), which is an adaptation of DSS for use with speakers of African American

Vernacular English, and the Language Assessment, Remediation, and Screening Procedure

7
(LARSP) (Crystal et al. 1989), a system for profiling the syntactic and discourse

development of children that is related to both age and stage.

The D-Level Analyzer is a computer program designed to automate the measurement of

syntactic complexity using the revised D-Level scale (Covington et al. 2006). Given a raw

sentence as input, the analyzer assigns it to an appropriate level on the scale. The program

achieves an accuracy of 93.2 per cent on spoken child language acquisition data from the

CHILDES database.

First of all, a corpus can be used to describe the characteristics of language produced by

children in different age groups or different stages of development. Children may exhibit a

considerable amount of variability in terms of language development. However, it is useful

to understand the average capability as well as the range of capabilities exhibited by

children within the same age group. Researchers generally agree that there are certain

milestones in child language development, or approximate ages at which specific language

capabilities usually emerge or mature. For example, at approximately 12 months of age,

words start to emerge; at approximately 24 months of age, children possess more than 50

vocabulary items and begin to spontaneously join these items into self-created two-word

phrases; and at approximately 30 months of age, children produce utterances with at least

two words, and many with three or even five words (Lenneberg 1967). A large corpus

consisting of language samples produced by children of different age groups can be used to

complement or confirm naturalistic observation for establishing or revisiting such

milestones. The CHILDES database constitutes a good example of such a corpus. Given a

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set of data that consists of transcripts of conversations involving targeted groups of children

in a particular age group, e.g. eighteen months, it is possible to use CLAN, Computerized

Profiling, and D-Level Analyzer to find out the average as well as the range of different

types of developmental metrics of interest exhibited by all the children in the group.

Second, a corpus can be used to investigate the sequence or order in which children acquire

different aspects of the system of their native language as well as to track the development

of individual children over time. This type of investigation necessitates a corpus of

longitudinal data, i.e. data collected from the same child or group of children over an

extended period of time, e.g. one to five years. An early example of this type of research is

Ramer (1977), who conducted a longitudinal study to investigate the developmental

sequence of syntactic acquisition in seven children. Specifically, she aimed to find out

whether there is “a universal sequence of emergence of grammatical relations leading up to

the production of S + V + O constructions” (p. 144). She analyzed her corpus data using a

hypothesized simplicity-complexity dimension based on the number of grammatical

relations produced and their expansions. She reported that the sequence of acquisition

specified in the hypothesized dimension was observed in the data from all seven children.

In a recent study, Khaghaninejad et al. (2018) analyzed a corpus in the CHILDES database

containing the utterances produced by five L1 Farsi Iranian children over a year to examine

the order of acquisition of Farsi consonants. Their analysis generated a ‘timeline’ for L1

Farsi children to acquire idealized articulations of different consonants.

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Third, a corpus can be used to assess the validity and adequacy of the various metrics

proposed for measuring child language development. This is an important enterprise as

such measures are often used for evaluating the level of language development of children

with developmental delays or disorders. One of the ways to approach this problem is

closely related to the descriptive and longitudinal research discussed above. Since these

metrics were proposed to measure language development, many of them were based on

observation of child language acquisition. Given a particular measure, it is sensible to

evaluate whether it reflects the developmental sequence or significantly differentiates the

developmental levels of children in different age groups. An example of this type of

research is Lu (2009), who analyzed data from the CHILDES database using the D-Level

Analyzer and reported a correlation of .648 (p < .001) between average D-Level scores and

speaker age as well as significant between-age differences in average D-level scores. A

second way to approach this problem is to examine whether a proposed measure

significantly differentiates between the developmental levels of children with and without

developmental disorders within the same age group. A good example of this line of

research is Hewitt et al. (2005). They compared scores of kindergarten children with a

mean age of six years with and without specific language impairment (SLI) on three

commonly used measures, i.e. MLU in morphemes, IPSyn, and NDWs. They found that

children with SLI showed significantly lower mean scores for all of the three measures,

except for some subtests of the IPSyn. In relation to this line of research, a corpus can also

be used to provide normative information for valid and adequate measures. To improve the

feasibility of applying these measures in practical situations and to enable researchers and

clinicians to make sense of the analytical results using these measures, it is necessary to

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have normative information for different age groups for benchmarking purposes. The

CHILDES database could again be used for providing such normative information.

Finally, a corpus can also be used to gain in-depth understanding of language development

disorders. Through comprehensive contrastive analyses, it is possible to qualitatively and

quantitatively describe the developmental differences between children with and without

language disorders, e.g. in terms of vocabulary size and range of syntactic structures. In

addition, longitudinal data can also be used to investigate the effect of a particular

therapeutic intervention. Early interventions play a critical role in optimizing the

developmental trajectory of children with language disorders during the best window of

opportunity (Pence and Justice 2017). By analyzing language samples produced before and

after a particular intervention, it is possible to evaluate whether targeted changes have

systematically occurred in a statistically significant way.

4. How can we use a corpus to find out more about second language development?

In this section, we discuss a number of ways that a corpus of learner language can be used

to find out more about L2 development. The Longitudinal Database of Learner English

(LONGDALE) (Meunier 2016) constitutes an excellent example of such a resource.

LONGDALE contains data from English learners from diverse L1 backgrounds, with all

learners contributing data at least once a year for three or more years. Various types of

spoken, written, and experimental data are included. The database also includes

comprehensive information about the learners and tasks, such as age, gender, language

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background, proficiency level, and task type, among others. The International Corpus of

Learner English (ICLE; Version 2) (Granger et al. 2009), while initially designed for

comparing learner English among learners from different L1 backgrounds as well as against

L1 English, has good potential for L2 development research as well. This corpus contains

3.7 million words of academic writing, mostly argumentative, by intermediate to advanced

learners of English as a foreign language, mostly university students, representing 16

different mother tongue backgrounds. The following learner variables are recorded for each

written text: age, learning context, proficiency level, gender, mother tongue, region,

knowledge of other foreign languages, and L2 exposure. These variables allow for cross-

sectional or quasi-longitudinal analysis that can offer useful insight into learner’s L2

development (Meunier 2015; see also chapter 23).

Various corpus processing tools can be used to analyze learner corpora in the different

ways to be discussed below (e.g. Lu 2014; 2017). For example, Coh-Metrix (McNamara et

al. 2014) can be used to assess the coherence and cohesion of language samples using a

large set of linguistic features. The Biber Tagger (Biber 1988) can be used to analyze a

large number of lexico-grammatical features of language samples. The Lexical Complexity

Analyzer (LCA) (Lu 2012) and the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical

Sophistication (TAALES) (Kyle et al. 2018) can be used to assess the lexical density,

lexical diversity, and lexical sophistication of learner texts using a large number of metrics.

The L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (L2SCA) (Lu 2010) and the Tool for the Automatic

Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity (TAASSC) (Kyle 2016) are both

designed for L2 writing syntactic complexity analysis. In addition, computational systems

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for automated grammatical error detection in learner writing are emerging (Leacock et al.

2014), such as Criterion Online Writing Evaluation Service developed by Educational

Testing Service (ETS) (available at www.ets.org/criterion), Cambridge English Write and

Improve (available at https://writeandimprove.com), and the Grammar and Mechanics

Error Tool (GAMET) (Crossley et al. 2019).

The first way a corpus can be used to reveal L2 development is as a database for describing

the characteristics of the interlanguage of learners at known proficiency levels. To this end,

it is necessary to have a learner corpus that encodes information about the learners’

proficiency levels. Proficiency level can be conceptualized in a number of different ways,

e.g. classroom grades, holistic ratings, program levels, school levels, and standardized test

scores (Wolfe-Quintero et al. 1998). The CEFR has also been increasingly used as a

calibration for proficiency level within learner corpora, such as the Cambridge Learner

Corpus (CLC), which is comprised of data from the Cambridge English Language

Assessment (Barker et al. 2015), and the EF-Cambridge Open Language Database

(EFCAMDAT), which consists of written samples from over 174,000 adult learners of

English as a second language (ESL) across the world (Huang et al. 2018). Linking to the

same framework of proficiency makes the results from different data sources more

comparable. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the use of any type of calibration for

proficiency, be it age, year of schooling, or the CEFR, is a workaround for not being able to

obtain large amounts of genuine longitudinal data (e.g. Meunier 2015), which, if available,

would be the preferred data source for investigating L2 development. In terms of analysis,

one may choose to focus on a particular aspect of the interlanguage, for example, the

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degree to which informal, colloquial patterns or styles are used in formal, written language.

One may also attempt to provide a comprehensive description of the lexico-grammatical

system of the interlanguage. For example, in the English Grammar Profile project,

O’Keeffe and Mark (2017) examined the patterns of grammatical development across the

six levels of the CEFR using the CLC. Their project resulted in a database of over 1,200

empirically-derived statements that can be used to characterize the grammatical

competence of English learners at different CEFR levels.

This type of descriptive study can benefit both from error analysis and from contrastive

analysis of learner data and L1 speaker data. To conduct an error analysis, it is necessary to

first design an error annotation scheme, which should be consistently followed in

identifying and annotating errors in learner text. An early example of an error annotation

scheme can be found in Granger (2003), which assigns each error first to one of the

following nine major domains: form, morphology, grammar, lexis, syntax, register, style,

punctuation, and typo, and then to a specific category within the domain. Lüdeling and

Hirschmann (2015) offer a systematic review of issues surrounding error annotation and

existing error annotation systems in learner corpus research. An error-annotated learner

corpus enables one to easily identify the common errors that learners at a given proficiency

level tend to make.

A contrastive study of learner data and L1 speaker data helps us to look at the

characteristics of the interlanguage from a different perspective, in particular, how it

converges to or differs from L1 speaker usage. For example, one may assess whether

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learners tend to overuse or underuse certain words, phrases, collocations, grammatical

constructions, speech acts, etc. relative to L1 speakers (Granger 1998; De Cock 2000). It is

important, however, to ensure that the learner data and the L1 speaker data are of

comparable nature in terms of mode, genre, and field, etc. The Trinity Lancaster Corpus,

which contains 4.2 million words of interaction between English learners and L1 speakers

(Gablasova et al. 2019), constitutes an excellent source of data for this purpose. Importantly,

however, it should be noted that recent notions in learner corpus research are starting to

move away from using L1 speaker data as a norm for comparing learner data and focus on

L2 competence as an entity for analysis in its own right (e.g. Granger 2015).

Second, a corpus may be used in developmental index studies to identify objective metrics

that can be used to index levels of L2 development or the learner’s overall language

proficiency. Earlier studies of CAF differences between different proficiency levels

contained substantial variability in terms of choice and definition of measures, writing task

used, sample size, corpus length, timing condition, etc., making it challenging to compare

the results reported (Wolfe-Quintero et al. 1998), as these factors have been found to affect

the CAF of learner language (e.g. Alexopoulou et al. 2017; Hsu 2019). To eliminate such

inconsistency and variability, recent research has evaluated or compared large sets of

measures on the same learner corpus or corpora. For example, Lu (2011) used L2SCA to

analyze large-scale L2 writing data from the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners

(WECCL) (Wen et al. 2005). The corpus is a collection of over 3,000 essays written by

English majors in nine different colleges in China. Each essay in the corpus is annotated

with a header that includes the following information: mode (written or spoken), genre

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(argumentation, narration, or exposition), school level (first, second, third, or fourth year in

college), year of admission (2000, 2001, 2002, or 2003), timing condition (timed with a 40-

minute limit or untimed), institution (a two- to four-letter code), and length (number of

words in the essay). Students in the same school level within the same institution wrote on

the same topics, but topics varied from institution to institution. Given the information that

is available in the corpus, proficiency level is conceptualized using school level. Through

the analysis, this study provided useful insights into how different syntactic complexity

measures perform as indices of college-level L2 writers’ language development, how they

relate to each other, and how their performances are affected by external factors.

Third, a corpus can be used to examine the contributions of knowledge of the L1 as well as

the effect of L1 transfer. One the one hand, knowledge of the L1 may prove helpful in

learning certain aspects of the L2, and learners with different L1 background may show

strengths in learning different aspects of the L2. On the other hand, the intrusion of L1 may

result in difficulty in acquiring certain lexico-grammatical aspects of the L2 and prevalence

of certain forms or grammatical patterns that deviate from the target language in the

interlanguage. Consequently, the interlanguages of learners at the same proficiency level

but with different L1 background may demonstrate some significantly different

characteristics. A contrastive study of such interlanguages may provide evidence of L1

influence, either positive or negative, on learner development and output (e.g. Granger et al.

2015; Murakami and Alexopoulou 2016). The ICLE corpus constitutes an excellent source

of data for this type of research, as students with diverse L1 background are represented. A

contrastive study of a learner’s L1 and interlanguage will provide further evidence on the

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L1 influence. One example of this type of research is Lu and Ai (2015), who analyzed data

from the ICLE and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) (Granger

1996) with L2SCA to examine differences in the syntactic complexity in English writing

among college-level writers with eight different L1 backgrounds, including seven L2

groups and one L1 group. They reported that the seven L2 groups demonstrated drastically

different patterns of difference from the L1 group.

Fourth, longitudinal learner corpora can be used to examine the trajectories and patterns of

learner development and to provide evidence to validate or challenge the claims and

assumptions of different theories of or approaches to L2 development. For example, the

complex dynamic systems approach views language development as a dynamic process

characterized by changing patterns of variability and interactions among different

subsystems of the language (Verspoor et al. 2011). Multiple longitudinal studies from this

approach have reported evidence that L2 developmental trajectories as well as the patterns

of interaction among different CAF features are highly variable and that such variability

follows the principles of dynamic systems (e.g. Larsen-Freeman 2006; Caspi 2010). Usage-

based approaches to L2 development take the position that L2 learning is achieved by

learning constructions, understood as conventionalized form-meaning mappings at varied

levels of complexity that are entrenched as language knowledge in the speakers’ mind

(Goldberg 1995). Research within this framework posits that language acquisition is shaped

by exposure to and usage of language and has reported that a learner’s repertoire of

constructions starts with fixed sequences and becomes increasingly more complex and

productive (Ellis et al. 2016). For example, Römer (2019) analyzed verb-argument

17
constructions (VACs) in a large-scale corpus of written texts produced by L2 learners at

varied levels of English proficiency and found that the learners’ inventory of VACs

developed from fixed sequences to more diverse, productive, and complex ones.

Finally, a corpus may be used to examine the role of instruction or the effect of a particular

pedagogical intervention on language development. For example, by examining corpus data

of different groups of learners at the same school level or program level that are exposed to

different types of instruction method, material, or linguistic environment, we may better

understand whether differences in instruction result in differences in L2 development. In

addition, by comparing the learner’s production prior to and after a period of targeted

pedagogical intervention, we may assess whether the intervention is effective in helping the

learner acquire particular aspects of the L2.

5. Looking to the future

As a field, corpus-based language development research will benefit tremendously from the

following future developments. First, language samples produced by children and L2

learners often contain many errors and as such present a challenge to natural language

processing (NLP) technology, especially when it comes to measures that involve syntactic,

semantic, and discourse analysis. Therefore, continued enhancement of existing NLP

technology and development of robust new NLP technology will facilitate more accurate

and reliable automatic analysis of language samples using more diversified measures. A

second avenue for future development in the field lies in the systematic collection and

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sharing of large-scale child and L2 development data that encodes richer information about

the children or learners producing the data. For child language development research, large-

scale longitudinal data and data of children with language disorders are particularly

valuable. The Growth in Grammar Corpus (Durrant et al. forthcoming), a large collection

of texts written by school children in England as part of their school work, constitutes an

excellent example of this avenue of development. For L2 development research,

systematical annotation of the learner’s proficiency level using as many conceptualizations

as possible will prove especially useful to L2 development researchers. These include

school levels, program levels, standardized test scores, holistic ratings, classroom grades,

etc. Large-scale data with richer information will make it easier to draw more reliable

conclusions for many of the types of research discussed above. Finally, analysis of L2

development data will benefit from the development of consistent and standardized error

annotation standards as well as improved automatic error detection techniques. L2

development researchers have often devised their own annotation schemes for error

analysis, which makes comparison and sharing of research results problematic. The field in

general will benefit from a more consistent annotation scheme. There has also been an

increasing stream of research in automatic error detection and correction (Crossley et al.

2019; Leacock et al. 2014). The maturity of such techniques will facilitate automatic error

analysis of large-scale L2 development data and enable researchers to gain more reliable

insights into L2 use.

6. Further reading

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Atkinson, D. (ed.) (2011) Alternative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition.

Abingdon: Routledge. (This edited volume presents a comprehensive introduction to and

comparison of six non-cognitivist approaches to second language acquisition.)

Lu, X. (2014) Computational Methods for Corpus Annotation and Analysis. Singapore:

Springer. (This book provides a systematic and accessible introduction to diverse types of

computational tools that can be used for automatic or computer-assisted annotation and

analysis of text corpora at various linguistic levels).

MacWhinney, B. (2000) The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk, 3rd edn.

Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (This book provides hands-on instruction on how

to transcribe naturalistic child language development data following the CHILDES format

and automatically analyze such data using CLAN. Readers are introduced to a set of

computational tools designed to improve the readability of transcripts, to automate the data

analysis process, and to facilitate the sharing of transcribed data).

Pence, L.K. and Justice, L.M. (2017) Language Development from Theory to Practice, 3rd

edn. New York: Pearson. (This book provides an extremely accessible introduction to the

theory and practice of child language development. The material presented in the book is

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20
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acquisition. It provides an excellent overview of each of these compelling theories).

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