SPLLOC: A new corpus for Spanish second language acquisition research
Rosamond Mitchell, Laura Domínguez, María J. Arche, Florence Myles, Emma J. Marsden · 2008
University of Southampton, University of Newcastle, University of York Abstract The contribution of Spanish to the field of SLA continues to grow (Lafford and Salaberry 2003, Montrul 2004), and the need for good L2 Spanish datasets is becoming increasingly evident. In this paper we introduce a newly created Spanish Learner Language Oral Corpus (SPLLOC), describing the rationale underlying the corpus design and methodology used for its construction. This project applying CHILDES tools to L2 Spanish follows successful creation of a collection of French L2 oral corpora (Rule et al 2003), already available at www.flloc.soton.ac.uk . Creating a successful oral corpus is costly and available corpora are often built somewhat opportunistically from available material rather than designed in a balanced way to facilitate SLA research. The SPLLOC corpus has been designed to fill the existing gap in Spanish L2 resources and also to support a focussed research agenda investigating learner development with respect to the verb phrase, clitic pronouns, and word order, from an interface perspective.